Quick Tiny Shows #04 – "Architecture For Plants"

“The fourth edition of these strange curatorial, para-institutional and independent experiments that we decided to call Quick Tiny Shows is, paradoxically, within one of the city's most important cultural organizations, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA). Immersed in the current context, suffocated by a deep ideological poverty and a notable disenchantment for a world in the middle of an ecological crisis, for this special edition we asked ten local and international participants to take a moment to closely observe different outstanding characteristics present in the plant world to later develop a series of objects considering a new domestic relationship between humans and plants. Oliver Sacks, in a small text that the English author left prepared for publication shortly before his death, opens the way for us to reconsider the canonically accepted Darwinian hierarchy that gives rise to the exceptional nature of the human being over the species that surround it– that specism that Donna Haraway has denounced so much in recent decades. Somehow, Sacks states in this text that the meticulous observations of specific plants lead Darwin to learn about humans by establishing a primary interdependence link between animals and plants. Far from being a minor science, botany can then become a gateway to the acceptance of different individualities within a flat ontology that operates by dodging any type of essentialist thinking to form new imprecise ties of kinship between particular entities that at the same time generate new unique entities. This extremely short exhibition, under the title of Architecture for Plants, brings this concomitance to the domestic environment and hopes to unleash new unknowns about how we interact with other species. Already freed from the search for that original plant from which all the rest derive, we enter a plastic, mobile and transforming territory, where responsibility and kindness with the non-human emerges as a fundamental condition for coexistence. Design here can operate not as a tool for analysis and repair of a broken nature, but as a discipline inclined to reconnect with our immediate material environment – it brings back a reality that seems to have escaped us. Our installation is neither a locus amoenus nor a locus terribilis - neither a beautiful ideal place to which we want to escape nor a focus of horror and violence from which we flee. It is rather a unique meeting point without origin, which brings out magic, mystery and enigma - dark territories sadly eradicated from contemporary architecture and design. Or seen in another way, it may simply be a temporary place of pure love not only towards the objects we create on a daily basis, but towards those organisms that we take for granted, but which are part of who we are and where we are going” Juan García Mosqueda