Huyghe’s practice is a sustained attack on the artwork as a closed, authored object. He proposes instead the exhibition as an ecological field: a place where organisms, technologies, climates, and chance operations co-produce reality. His works often begin with a gesture of release—handing agency to nonhuman actors—so that the piece can develop like a habitat rather than a composition. Growth, decay, mutation, and unpredictability are not accidents; they are the core medium. This shift has profound implications. If the work is an open system, then meaning cannot be fully scripted. It emerges from interactions: between bacteria and architecture, between viewers and atmospheres, between algorithms and weather. The result is a temporal ethics. You don’t “finish” a Huyghe work; you encounter it mid-becoming, as you would a forest, a reef, a city. Critically, Huyghe does not aestheticize nature as a soothing outside. His ecologies are often unsettling—alien, opaque, indifferent. They remind us that the nonhuman is not a metaphor for human feelings; it is a force with its own rhythms and intelligences. In a culture obsessed with control, his practice insists on contingency: the world’s capacity to exceed planning. Contingent Ecologies repositions art as an experimental zone where the boundaries between life and medium dissolve. The viewer is no longer sovereign; they are a participant species. And that is the political sting: to feel, physically, that the world does not revolve around us—and that new forms of imagination begin precisely at the edge of our authorship.
