Microlandscapes
Microlandscapes
Photography, video installation, mixed media, and cultures
Microlandscapes are post-natural geographies that emerge from an exercise in speculative landscaping. Through the distortion of the scientific technique of cultivation in Petri dishes, this practice proposes the creation of divergent landscapes at a microscopic scale. Within them, territories are reconstructed from fragments of physical or affective environments, accounting for the organicities, bonds, residues, and memories that are activated therein.
Microlandscapes function as a tool to narrate spaces through the invisible relationships of those who inhabit them, directing the gaze toward what escapes normative representations of space and interspecies relations. This practice distorts a scientific technique originally intended to cultivate organisms for definitional purposes—to isolate and classify biological samples—and reorients it toward the creation of speculative landscapes that overflow into promiscuous and deviant ecologies.
The microlandscape invites movement across scales as a method of research and critical fabulation. From this perspective, the relationships between the different elements that constitute these territories are twisted, and the separation between the organic and the artificial becomes blurred, to the point of making it impossible to discern what precedes and what follows a nature already intervened in by multiple agencies.
In this way, the generative—and regenerative—capacity of post-natural assemblages is reclaimed as a means of giving rise to new configurations that integrate biotic and abiotic entities. These configurations embody ways of inhabiting the planet in its current moment: a reality in which both our bodies and the ecosystems we traverse are constantly modulated by synthetic agents that reconfigure our biologies and ecologies.
Earth-embodied microlandscapes
Video installation
A microlandscape is a suspended place, composed of improbable existences and divergent becomings. Temporarily confined within the boundaries of organic matter that grows, changes, and decomposes, it is marked by its own impermanence. It represents geographies of bodies in potential, challenging their conditions of normativity in an emerging environment.
In Earth-embodied microlandscapes, these territories are reconstructed through the memory of the fragment, which is activated when joined with other fragments of reality. In doing so, they explore a new post-natural condition within artifice, generating speculative landscapes of existences and relationships that suggest new scenarios of possibility. The indeterminacy of what grows and develops in the microlandscape evokes the capacity of organisms to adapt to a transforming environment. Within the fragility of a constantly changing micro-ecosystem, the microlandscape engages in dialogue with its own impermanence.
Data sheet
Title: Earth-embodied microlandscapes
Author: Marzia Matarese
Year: 2024
Medium:
Two-channel digital video installation
Specs:
The video installation consists of two videos with audio (the audio is the same for both channels). The projections can be placed on juxtaposed or opposing surfaces (in the latter case, the intention is to create a space that the audience can pass through). The two projections should be played in sync to ensure the audio matches.
Voice over audio transcription:
It took side-glancing to see it emerge, some distancing in order to zoom in.
That landscape slowly coming to life as the embodiment of their desire to sprout.
Transform, digest, excrete, and reproduce.
An open body made of fields of possibility, stretching to host more and more bodies as they wake up to consciousness.
Transform, digest, excrete, and reproduce. Again. Over and over.
As a thriving mat of fuming exhalations, uttering their own terms.
We were born from scum, from the fragments of what you failed to acknowledge and was thus left behind.
We are the child of a bastard matter, a disorderly and dissident recomposition against the order you believed to be natural.
A provocative, mocking recomposition.
Our existence lies in the tearing meaning given to a new world, futures hijacked along the trails of a stuttering and unpredictable evolution, reclaiming an unimaginable future.
We are the not-only child of what you couldn’t domesticate, of what you couldn’t destroy, hide, annihilate.
We are the body beyond the human, a body shaped by its own territory.
Bodies distributed in constant mediation between themselves, with themselves. In constant negotiation with the territories they occupy and by which they are occupied.
Bodies that grow by feeding on other bodies, feeding on each other. In the constant creation of new life and new meaning through asexual reproduction.
Nonlinear flesh, flashing glimpses of stolen inheritance.
We metabolize each other, if possible, whenever possible, wherever possible.
We metabolize each other.
Holobiont Anarchives
As a research tool, Holobiont Anarchives enables the mapping of collective experiences in a situated and relational approach. This methodology addresses the micropolitics of affect, collective memory, historical and ecological damages, multispecies relations, and the links between a collective body and its territory, adopting a non-anthropocentric, transecofeminist, and queer perspective.
Photo Credits: Luna Coppola. Workshop with Arquea Colectivo at Einxs Pro.