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Emanuele Coccia: The Cosmic Garden
The Cosmic Garden
(p. 17 – 30)

Emanuele Coccia

The Cosmic Garden

PDF, 14 pages

  • architecture
  • cultural critic
  • ecology
  • aesthetics
  • art theory

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English

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English

Emanuele Coccia

is an Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He is the author of Sensible Life (Fordham University Press, 2016), of Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image (Fordham University Press, 2018), The Life of Plants (Polity, 2018), and, with Donatien Grau, The Transitory Museum (­Polity, 2019). He has written numerous essays on visual artists and served as a scientific advisor to the exhibition Nous les arbres at the Fondation ­Cartier, Paris, in 2019.
Other texts by Emanuele Coccia for DIAPHANES
Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time ‘beyond’ modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds.