Postnatural gardening

MUSE Agorà becomes a garden full of ideas, stories and interactions through events, workshops, screenings and participatory readings.

The project Postnatural gardening. Ecological practices for interspecies care aims to rethink the relationships between human cultures and the plant world, inviting us to shift our anthropocentric focus on plants, fungi, flowers, herbs and fruits and to embrace inclusive horizontal visions towards all other more than human beings, creating alliances based on empathy and coexistence.

The Institute for Postnatural Studies invites MUSE researchers to redefine the narratives surrounding our understanding of ‘nature’ through speculative and imaginative methodologies that move beyond taxonomies. Practices for creating a post-natural garden challenge the values that underpin modernity and redefine new ways of being in the world through a non-colonial perspective that decentralises the human.

Creating a lexicon of some of the actions that connect us to the world of botany – and that shape contemporary ecological practices – allows us to collectively re-signify concepts and classifications on which the societies of a certain part of the world have historically been based.

The exhibition is accompanied by projections of videos by Noor Abuarafeh, Seba Calfuqueo and Blanca Gracia, which extend the museum’s narratives and views of what we call ‘nature’.

Founded in 2020, the Institute for Postnatural Studies is conceived as a critical platform, a network that brings together artists and researchers concerned with the global ecological crisis and acts through experimental exchange formats for the production of open knowledge.

With a multidisciplinary approach, the Institute develops long-term research focusing on issues such as ecology, coexistence, politics and territories. These lines of enquiry take various forms, including seminars, exhibitions and residencies, which serve as venues for academic and artistic experimentation.

Source: https://www.muse.it