A Cartography of Intellectual Inheritance * Socioplastics

Every substantive theoretical project emerges from a specific genetic endowment—a constellation of fields, debates and authors whose concepts it metabolises, whose questions it inherits and whose limits it attempts to exceed. Socioplastics is no exception. The framework now consolidated as Muse, calibrated through its Proportional Scale Index and articulated across ten KORE cores, did not arise from disciplinary vacancy. It crystallised within a dense intellectual ecology, drawing on infrastructures of thought that range from cybernetics to decolonial feminism, from media archaeology to urban political ecology. The following sequence maps this ecology with two distinct axes of reading. The first is genetic: which fields provided the conceptual DNA for Socioplastics? Infrastructure studies contributed the notion of art as operative substrate; ontology furnished the language of scale and objecthood; systems theory supplied recursion and autopoiesis. The second axis is proximity: which fields currently sit closest to Socioplastics in thematic terrain, ready for dialogue, contrast or intervention? Urban studies, posthumanism and sovereignty debates occupy this near field, offering immediate zones of application and friction. The ordering therefore reflects strategic calibration rather than taxonomic neutrality. 

Poetics of Plants and Politics of Place

Giovanni Aloi’s work as an art historian, curator and editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture offers a compelling lens through which we can reassess how flora and fauna are represented in art, revealing shifting societal attitudes towards the more-than-human world and advocating for a deeper ethical entanglement with nature beyond anthropocentric views; grounded in posthumanist and critical plant studies, Aloi critiques the legacy of objectification in natural history representation, highlighting how taxidermy, dioramas, and classical botanical aesthetics once served to domesticate or monumentalise nature’s difference, whereas today’s artists increasingly embrace the subtlety of moss, fungi, bacteria and vegetal intelligence, shifting the focus toward sentience, interdependence and vulnerability; in conversation with Urška Škerl, Aloi expresses ambivalence about the rise of Anthropocene discourse in the arts, where performative virtue and white-saviour dynamics often displace genuine attention to plants and animals, noting that while climate urgency fuels new artistic strategies, these are sometimes too human-centred to address ecological degradation with integrity; Aloi proposes a “cosmopolitan garden” as an alternative to the rigid native/non-native binary, advocating for species combinations that prioritise pollinator support, resilience and climate adaptation over aesthetic purity, echoing Michael Pollan’s ecological pragmatism and aligning with contemporary designers like Paolo Pejrone and Luciano Giubbilei, whose work balances local identity with environmental sensitivity; through his own books, notably Why Look at Plants?, Aloi applies Foucault’s notion of epistemic spatialisation to explore how spaces like the home, garden or greenhouse shape our perceptual frameworks and entangle architecture with vegetal life; his vision is neither nostalgic nor utopian but speculative and grounded, calling for ethical imagination, cultural diversity, and artistic inquiry that centre materiality, empathy and situated knowledge in the face of an accelerating climate crisis. Aloi, G. and Škerl, U. (2026) Art Rethinking Nature: Giovanni Aloi, Landezine. Available at: https://www.landezine.com

Socioplastics Urbanism: Cities as Sites of Conflictual Pedagogy and Speculative Praxis * To rethink the city as a self-organising tension field is to inhabit its architecture as an ethics of interruption

In reframing urbanism as a form of operational closure rather than technical planning, Socioplastics inaugurates a paradigmatic shift where the city is no longer conceived as an object to be shaped by sovereign design but as an affective, linguistic, and ecological meshwork that recursively constitutes its own modes of inclusion and exclusion, this repositioning dissolves the dream of urban harmony and instead foregrounds the political as a terrain of unresolved negotiation, embedding friction not as dysfunction but as critical vitality, central to this reorientation is the metaphor of urban taxidermy, a conceptual tool that challenges both tabula rasa demolitions and nostalgic preservation by framing intervention as contextual re-framing grounded in contemporary art practice, the ethical weight of this gesture lies in its refusal of neutrality—every act of care, delimitation, or spatial recognition inevitably defines boundaries and produces exclusions, therefore, Socioplastics does not seek consensus, but cultivates the city as a space of perpetual contestation, where design becomes a performative interface rather than a stabilising solution, a compelling case is the mobilisation of pedagogy as spatial praxis, displacing learning from institutional containers into embodied urban acts—walking, listening, pausing, occupying—which aligns with traditions of socially engaged art while exposing the risk of knowledge extraction through overdocumentation, as such, radical pedagogy must also defend opacity, protecting refusal and silence as essential modes of resistance within a hyper-productive urban regime, architecturally, this manifests as a commitment to tectonic austerity, porosity, and ecological attunement, resisting iconic spectacle in favour of open-ended forms that prompt interaction, misuse, and reinterpretation, by insisting that questions of sustainability are inseparable from labour, spatial justice, and access, Socioplastics injects political density into ecological discourse and disrupts any technocratic reading of green design, ultimately, the Socioplastic Mesh functions not as a masterplan but as a speculative assemblage—a spatial score for reactivation—where architecture and urbanism are cast as post-autonomous practices, always unfinished, always relational, their value lies not in resolution but in their ability to sustain critical attention, holding the city open as an ever-evolving zone of co-constructed meaning.

Future Utopia Community Key: A Rural Experiment in Post-Human Sustainability and Artistic Socio-Transformation – Rethinking the Role of the Artist as Agent of Communal Change

Future Utopia Community Key is an Artist in Residence (AiR) program rooted in the rural village of Uddebo and its surrounding territory. Its central idea is simple and demanding: to align artistic practice with the concrete social, ecological, economic, and political needs of a rural community committed to sustainability and the defence of the commons. The program operates as a collaborative agency rather than a conventional residency. It prioritises process over product, social bonding over individual authorship, and situated knowledge over abstract speculation. Artists and thinkers are invited to work with the village, not on it, embedding themselves in everyday life and contributing to collective imaginaries of post-human, post-capitalist, and post-colonial futures. The focus lies on utopian models understood not as fantasies, but as pragmatic tools for transformation. Future Utopia Community Key adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, welcoming visual artists, philosophers, architects, designers, researchers, and innovators. Particular attention is given to the economic and social conditions of art-making, exploring alternative modes of production, exchange, and care. Rurality is approached as a site of resistance and experimentation, where new forms of social organisation can be tested at a human scale. Four guest residents are invited each year through invitation or partnerships with institutions and funding bodies. Residencies last one to two weeks, recurring periodically over a two-year cycle. Outcomes vary widely in form—discursive, spatial, performative, or relational—but share a commitment to context-based collaboration and socio-political agency. The long-term aim is to articulate a replicable model of self-sustainability: flexible, adaptive, and transferable to other rural contexts. In this sense, the residency functions less as a retreat and more as a living laboratory for collective futures.