:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE GARDEN THAT LEARNED TO READ ITS MACHINES: COMPANION SPECIES, TECHNICAL MEMORY, COLONIAL LANDSCAPES AND THE UNFINISHED ARCHITECTURE OF A SHARED WORLD

Sunday, July 19, 2026

THE GARDEN THAT LEARNED TO READ ITS MACHINES: COMPANION SPECIES, TECHNICAL MEMORY, COLONIAL LANDSCAPES AND THE UNFINISHED ARCHITECTURE OF A SHARED WORLD

Donna Haraway’s companion species inhabit neither an innocent nature nor a purely fabricated world; they emerge in the contested interval where bodies, technologies, stories and institutions learn to modify one another without achieving final reconciliation. This interval provides a useful entrance into a field in which Clark Aldrich’s designed simulations encounter Wiebe Bijker’s socially constructed technologies, revealing that no machine arrives alone: each carries pedagogies, interests, habits, classifications and latent models of the human. Park Chan-kyong’s movement between shamanic histories and divided modernities further unsettles the technical object, while Fernand Deligny’s lines of wandering disclose forms of existence that cannot be reduced to institutional language.

Richard Ford’s exact social surfaces and Barbara Hammer’s insurgent cinema show, by different means, that representation is never merely descriptive. It organizes proximity, visibility and permission. Bernie Krause listens beneath the apparent silence of landscapes to acoustic communities already damaged by extraction, while Ana Matey treats movement, residue and bodily action as instruments through which environments become legible. The landscape, accordingly, is not a neutral background. Frederick Law Olmsted’s public grounds institutionalized particular relations between civic health, circulation and cultivated nature, yet Manuel Sacristán reminds us that ecological thought remains politically incomplete when detached from labour, inequality and historical materialism. Michael Taussig’s mimetic disturbances carry this problem into the unstable traffic between colonial authority, magical thought and bodily knowledge. Louis Wolfson’s violent reengineering of language, Emmanuel Levinas’s encounter with irreducible alterity and Erich Hörl’s analysis of technological environments all suggest that meaning begins where sovereignty over the world becomes impossible. Navjot Altaf extends this displacement into collaborative practices shaped by communities, land and contested development, transforming authorship from possession into negotiated duration. The modern city already sensed this crisis. Charles Baudelaire found it in the fugitive crowd, H.D. in the fractured image and Mani Kaul in cinematic temporalities liberated from narrative obedience. Peter Paul Rubens’s turbulent bodies, by contrast, appear to belong to another visual regime, yet their folds and centrifugal energies anticipate a persistent question: how can an image contain forces that exceed its frame? Igshaan Adams answers through woven topographies marked by domestic movement, class, spirituality and memory. Tony Bennett locates cultural display within governmental systems, while Abraham Cruzvillegas converts precarious construction into a grammar of contingent support. Sylvie Fleury dissects consumer surfaces by exaggerating their seductive codes; Marguerite Humeau fabricates speculative organisms from palaeontology, sound and technological fiction; Bernard Lassus approaches landscape as a field of perceptual invention rather than scenic decoration. Across these practices, W. J. T. Mitchell’s question of what pictures want becomes inseparable from Andrea Phillips’s analysis of value, governance and cultural labour. Images do not merely circulate. They accumulate obligations, demand maintenance and reorganize the institutions that host them. Araba Sey’s work on technology and inequality makes clear that circulation never guarantees access, while Francis Upritchard’s awkward figures, Clara Adolphs’s displaced photographic memories and Kerstin Brätsch’s unstable painterly surfaces resist the fantasy that representation could be securely assigned to a single time, body or medium. Stuart Davis translated the commercial and rhythmic city into compressed chromatic signs, whereas Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote from the fracture between imperial historiographies, producing a double vision that neither Spanish conquest nor Inca memory could completely contain. General Idea turned the language of branding, medicine and mass communication against the regimes that produced it. Jules Bastien-Lepage’s rural naturalism and Gustave Moreau’s saturated symbolism may seem opposed, but both reveal how the visible is constructed through culturally authorized forms of attention. Dzvinia Podlyashevska’s social interiors and Șerban Savu’s suspended postindustrial scenes continue this interrogation of ordinary visibility: labour, waiting and estrangement become perceptible precisely because dramatic action has withdrawn. Sissel Tolaas makes smell into an archive of places and political conditions, disrupting the visual supremacy of knowledge. Chika Okeke-Agulu reconstructs modernism through African intellectual and artistic genealogies that canonical narratives had relegated to the periphery. Mathew Brady’s photographic record of war demonstrates the evidentiary authority and moral ambiguity of technical images, while Alex de Waal’s analyses of famine and political catastrophe expose how suffering is administered through systems rather than arriving as a natural event. Lucian Freud turns bodily presence into prolonged scrutiny; Rebecca Horn converts the body into an extended mechanical threshold; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha situates care, disability and survival within collective infrastructures rather than private heroism. Yue Minjun’s repeating laughter becomes an apparatus of psychic and political estrangement. Giuseppe Penone reveals the tree within timber and time within material, while Lucas Samaras destabilizes domestic intimacy through reflective chambers, altered photographs and excessive colour. Nato Thompson’s attention to socially engaged practice asks how action enters public life without becoming merely symbolic. Hans Hollein’s proposition that everything is architecture acquires sharper consequences when architecture is understood not as unrestricted expansion but as responsibility for the interfaces through which bodies, information and resources move. Kamal al-Din Bihzad’s intricate spatial fields distribute attention across simultaneous actions; August Macke’s chromatic urban scenes translate modern spectatorship into luminous rhythm; Tarsila do Amaral metabolizes European modernism through Brazilian landscapes, bodies and colonial contradictions. Zeami Motokiyo’s theory of presence offers a different model of intensity, one based on temporal discipline, interval and the cultivated appearance of effortlessness. Rachel Ruysch’s botanical compositions situate scientific precision inside baroque mortality, reminding us that classification and decay have always shared the same table. Claudia Pagés examines speech, logistics and material circulation, while Bobrikova & de Carmen construct temporary social ecosystems through collective labour and alternative economies. Patty Chang’s vulnerable performances expose how intimacy is structured by migration, kinship, waste and geopolitical distance. August Sander’s typological portraits promised a social atlas, yet every atlas risks transforming singular lives into legible specimens. Homi K. Bhabha’s ambivalence and hybridity interrupt such taxonomic confidence by locating cultural production within translation, mimicry and unequal encounters. Alfred Russel Wallace’s biogeography and Antoine Lavoisier’s chemical transformations represent decisive acts of scientific ordering, but their legacies also show that knowledge emerges through instruments, routes, imperial collections and conventions of measurement. Eleanor Maguire’s research into memory and spatial navigation returns this scientific architecture to the moving body. The city is retained not as a complete picture but through paths, thresholds and repeated decisions. Jayati Ghosh and Steve Keen confront the abstractions of economic orthodoxy, demonstrating how models can obscure the material worlds they claim to explain. Duan Yucai’s philological investigations reveal language as a stratified historical technology; Wang Yangming relocates knowledge within action; Al-Kindi develops translation as philosophical transformation rather than passive transmission; Kūkai binds writing, ritual, image and cosmos into an integrated semiotic environment. These genealogies resist the assumption that modern knowledge radiates from a single centre. Ocean Vuong’s syntax carries war, migration, tenderness and intergenerational fracture without forcing them into stable identity. adrienne maree brown transforms speculative imagination into a practice of relational and political adaptation. Dunne & Raby use design not to resolve problems prematurely but to construct objects around which disagreement can become tangible. Ada Colau’s trajectory from housing activism to municipal government illustrates the unstable passage between insurgent claims and institutional administration. Arkady Strugatsky’s speculative worlds test political systems by displacing them into estranged environments. Pushpamala N. restages photographic conventions to expose their colonial, ethnographic and gendered scripts, while Chela Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness proposes tactical movement among ideological positions. Diao Yinan turns urban space into noir choreography, where infrastructure and violence occupy the same nocturnal field. Molleindustria treats the video game as a critical model of labour, finance and governance. Tourmaline reconstructs histories of Black trans life through cinematic imagination and archival repair. Gay Hawkins follows the ethical and infrastructural lives of waste, showing that disposal is not disappearance but a social relation displaced from sight. Christophe Bonneuil places environmental crisis within histories of industrialization, empire and political choice, refusing the neutralizing language of a universal humanity. Caye Casas uses bodily excess and domestic horror to rupture the polite surfaces of social order. Néstor García Canclini studies cultural hybridity through cities, media, consumption and uneven modernization, making circulation itself an object of critique. Ayad Akhtar stages the conflicts between finance, belief, assimilation and racialization; João Guimarães Rosa transforms the sertão into a linguistic cosmos; Alejandro Zambra constructs intimacy from omissions, minor memories and incomplete documents. Emily Apter’s untranslatability protects difference from frictionless equivalence. Krys Lee writes migration through fractured households and divided political geographies. Thomas Ligotti imagines consciousness as an intolerable architectural condition, whereas Günther Uecker’s fields of nails transform violence into tactile rhythm. Tsui Hark’s cinema accelerates history into bodies, technologies and choreographed instability. Quim Monzó dissects everyday logic until habit becomes absurd. Friedrich Dürrenmatt turns justice into a labyrinth where institutions encounter their own grotesque consequences. Amateur Architecture Studio works with reused materials, vernacular knowledge and historical fragments, opposing the erasure imposed by accelerated urbanization. Manuel Moldes converts landscape and cultural memory into a dense pictorial language. Michael Hensel approaches architecture through performance, ecology and differentiated material systems. Gertrud Arndt’s self-portraits expose identity as serial construction rather than fixed essence. Tomson Highway brings Cree language, humour, music and colonial violence into theatrical forms that resist ethnographic containment. Nellie Campobello closes this constellation without sealing it: her compressed accounts of revolution preserve history through gestures, voices and remembered bodies rather than monumental narrative. What joins these positions is not agreement but a shared pressure upon the boundaries that separate organism from machine, archive from fiction, garden from government and image from evidence. A field becomes durable when these boundaries remain traversable yet accountable, when relations can be read by a person without becoming opaque to technical systems, and when machinic legibility does not flatten historical difference. Its architecture is therefore neither a universal classification nor an unrestricted network. It is a cultivated terrain of translations, resistances, repairs and intervals: a garden that knows every path is political, every instrument carries a memory, and every act of naming must leave room for the life it cannot contain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donna Haraway — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway

Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html

Anto Lloveras

Socioplastics — LAPIEZA-LAB

WITH

Donna Haraway, Clark Aldrich, Wiebe Bijker, Park Chan-kyong, Fernand Deligny, Richard Ford, Barbara Hammer, Bernie Krause, Ana Matey, Frederick Law Olmsted, Manuel Sacristán, Michael Taussig, Louis Wolfson, Emmanuel Levinas, Erich Hörl, Navjot Altaf, Charles Baudelaire, H.D., Mani Kaul, Peter Paul Rubens, Igshaan Adams, Tony Bennett, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sylvie Fleury, Marguerite Humeau, Bernard Lassus, W. J. T. Mitchell, Andrea Phillips, Araba Sey, Francis Upritchard, Clara Adolphs, Kerstin Brätsch, Stuart Davis, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, General Idea, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Moreau, Dzvinia Podlyashevska, Șerban Savu, Sissel Tolaas, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Mathew Brady, Alex de Waal, Lucian Freud, Rebecca Horn, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Yue Minjun, Giuseppe Penone, Lucas Samaras, Nato Thompson, Hans Hollein, Kamal al-Din Bihzad, August Macke, Tarsila do Amaral, Zeami Motokiyo, Rachel Ruysch, Claudia Pagés, Bobrikova & de Carmen, Patty Chang, August Sander, Homi K. Bhabha, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Lavoisier, Eleanor Maguire, Jayati Ghosh, Steve Keen, Duan Yucai, Wang Yangming, Al-Kindi, Kūkai, Ocean Vuong, adrienne maree brown, Dunne & Raby, Ada Colau, Arkady Strugatsky, Pushpamala N., Chela Sandoval, Diao Yinan, Molleindustria, Tourmaline, Gay Hawkins, Christophe Bonneuil, Caye Casas, Néstor García Canclini, Ayad Akhtar, João Guimarães Rosa, Alejandro Zambra, Emily Apter, Krys Lee, Thomas Ligotti, Günther Uecker, Tsui Hark, Quim Monzó, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Amateur Architecture Studio, Manuel Moldes, Michael Hensel, Gertrud Arndt, Tomson Highway, Nellie Campobello.