The Delft Botanical Garden shouldn’t exist.
The plants within its walls are not natural neighbors. They are there through the intervention of man. They are there through the circumnavigation of the globe undertaken by Dutch traders, linking the country’s far-flung colonies to Europe and bringing together species that never should have come into contact.
Now, a journey that once took months, if not years, has sped up with the Great Acceleration and within days great distances are spanned. Such speed has lead to unintended passengers, specimens that have hitchhiked across the globe. An Asian beetle finds its way into packing material, the journey is so swift that it survives to lay eggs, and soon the Ash trees in North America are facing extinction. Our mobility and international trade become parts of a grand experiment, allowing the recombination of species from different ecologies, creating new systems, even new species. So perhaps the fruit of this experiment is what will survive our uncertain future. These hybrids will grow and prosper as they find new niches.
Through our proposed workshop, we are going to take the old species, thrown together from across the globe in the Botanical Garden, and study them. Participants will engage in a detailed examination of garden specimens to capture their essence, reproducing their findings in the limited vocabulary of silhouettes and cut paper. Then we shall experiment, echoing the actions of pollinators as they flit from one flower to another, using the code to hybridize the studies, the forms, into new species. Some will fail, structurally unsound, others will create things of new beauty, randomly combining into a stronger form.
Then, as horticulturalists do, the participants will pick and choose, presenting the combinations they deem the most interesting, the most exotic, and the most beautiful. The process of nature will be reflected in the process of the workshop, a mimicry of the genetic combinations that will become increasingly dynamic as species travel beyond their traditional boundaries and the Earth’s climate becomes more wildly unpredictable. We have, intentionally or unintentionally, become the means of their passage, even their pollinators, and the method of adaptation and survival in the coming climate. The participants in the Recombinant Flora will condense and control the process within the workshop, acting as observers and facilitators, gardeners of an (im)probable garden of the future that they will grow, tend, and present to the conference.
Research Through Design 2019; Method and Critique will take place in Delft and Rotterdam, NL, between the 19th and 22nd of March 2019.
The Recombinant Flora Workshop will take place on the 19th. You can register for just the workshop, the entire conference, or both at this website.