Associated Projects
The Refiguration of Nature Conservation: The Case of Botanical Gardens
In this seed funding project we investigate the shifting conservation regime as a relevant object of research for understanding the refiguration of Modern institutions dealing with the conservation of nature in the Anthropocene.
Botanical garden museums are undergoing profound transformations. At the beginning of the 21st century refiguring processes, including climate change, the imperative of decolonisation, and advances in (digital) technology have led to a shift in the positioning of botanical gardens from Humboldtian collectors of nature to protectors of biodiversity. In this project, through the sociospatial investigation of Berlin’s Botanical Garden (Bo), we analyse the ordering logics underpinning the “staging of nature” within the glasshouses – caught between conflicting logics of fixity and change. For example, we consider how cacti are spatially arranged, where they are placed in relation to other species, how they arrived at Bo, which other sites and places they travelled through, and under which conditions? How are they classified and categorized? What atmosphere needs to be (re)produced to allow them to grow in northern Europe and for what purpose? And, what role do scientific and non-scientific networks play in what is understood about cacti, how do cacti transform as they circulate through and between such networks, how and where are these networks connected? What material infrastructures, such as soil, labs, flowerbeds, exhibitions, home gardens, nurseries, shops etc. facilitate these circulations and transformations? Are there specific trajectories which are more important than others in the flows of plant material, information, knowledge and power?
Empirically, we conduct site visits, interviews, photography, surveying, and drawing to collect data in two gardens: the Botanical Garden in Berlin and the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh. By applying what we call the ‘Hybrid Mapping’ methodology, we research and render visible the trans-local spatial assemblages, diverse actors and material infrastructures at work in the co-production of knowledge connected to the Botanical Gardens Berlin. Through a combine sociological and design lens, the project contributes methodically and practically to establish mapping methods as a critical, creative and reflexive approach for socio-spatial design research.
Over the last two years, we have deployed the concept of staging nature to deconstruct and describe the specific spatial arrangements of botanical glasshouses and gardens as a multiplicity of social and ecological forces undergirded by colonial histories and Western scientific practices. Staging nature implies both the practices and knowledge that go into the spatial organisation of Berlin‘s botanic gardens. It is a specific type of spatial arrangement acknowledging both the social construction of nature, carefully choreographed as ‘wild’ or ‘pristine’ and entangled with curatorial and scientific practices on one hand, and the performativity of nature as agential, lively, material nonhuman life, on the other. The concept aims to grasp the hybridity of more-than-human spaces as both real and culturally produced. With the concepts of enclaving and exclaving, we want to refer to specific material and discursive processes of boundary making and the practices of overcoming such boundaries. It aims to help articulate the tensions, conflicts and struggles between deeply territorial and political practices of ringfencing, bordering, containing etc. associated with efforts to stage nature and the ways these territorialisations are overcome through lines of flight, plant agencies, porosities, networking, piggybacking, or more speculatively, mimicking, echoing, and rehearsing. With these concepts we articulate aspects of the refiguration of conservation at work.
