parasitoid Cell of desirable future


2019 - ongoing
Installation, 76 snow globes containing miniature sculptures, wooden platform, 2019-ongoing

As part of the long term project on dissecting the notion of gardening, and its colonial and imperial dimension particularly as an impulse to collect, rename, relocate and fence-off. In this new work, the work looks into the emergence of gardening video games, most of which foreground growth and cultivation over the industry’s more traditional subjects of conflict and challenge. Inside crystal balls are characters drawn from “Starcraft”, with players that appear as robotic astrobiologists on an alien planet whose only mission is to aid the blooming of its bizarre, gently undulating plants; or a  “Fallout 4”, exploring horticultural play albeit to different ends (the former a first-person adventure, the latter a slow-paced succulent simulator); or Minecraft, where the player as a character exists as a plantation owner within a feudal system of market exchange and class division.

Here, what we see in these glass balls, symbols and tools perhaps par excellence for reading the future, are both utopian and dystopian visions at the same time, all related to gardening and the environment. Creatures derived or inspired by these games, images of what could be “perhaps and if only” that type of constructed imagination would become real. An emerald city, a dark mirror, one to closely look at, in order to avoid for those monsters and nightmares to take real form, and perhaps understand the present by looking into its potential future.  

The sculpture structure is based on the protoporphyrin molecular structure (the shared crucial molecule in all living organism) matched over architectural structure of four-parted garden.

Installation shots: Hannes Widemann



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