Art-Practice Outline collaboration: Our Planetary Garden: Biodiversity Datafication for Collaborative Citymaking

Can we rethink the paradigms that have guided our observation, participation and relationships with nature to date through artistic practice and art-inspired thinking and by increasing the use of new technologies? Since time immemorial, the human body has coalesced, entangled, and co-evolved with nature. One of the very first relationships we ever formed, as humans on Earth, was the one we had—and continue to have—with plants. Yet more often than not, in this modern world, when we think seriously of communing meaningfully with nature, of actual plant-human and more-than human relationships, we are met with a reductionist worldview, where nature is generally seen as a non-agential, non-sentient, backdrop to the central drama of human life on Earth. Gilles Clément1 envisioned our world as a “planetary garden,” collapsing the anthropocentric divisions of good and bad, and intentionally collaborating with rather than “managing” plants and all other nonhuman living beings. Our initiative, Our Planetary Garden, we seek to foster alliances of technology and artistic practice to explore possible ways to address our relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of ‘knowledge’ to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Our Planetary Garden proposes two art-practice engagements with the Ministry and the Biodiversity Monitoring Project, where in the following 6-months our team, exploration space, will develop (2) artworks based on two main databases provided by the Biodiversity Monitoring Project. Our work outputs will provide the farmers and community new angles and sensory aspects to consider and experience as stewards of the land, and how to grow liveable worlds. Moreover, these engagements present the concept of “planetary” where Everything is conscious in our environment and thus capable of reciprocal relationships. Communicating, flourishing, and making kin with plants then becomes not only possible, but embedded as a feature of normal awareness as well as ritualized practice. Through nature, we are therefore entangled with an invisible thread that connects all that is living, because, quite simply, we are alive and co-evolve in a shared space. When we attune our human senses to the vibrancy of life itself, it is impossible not to feel a sense of mystery and reverence pulsating through all bodies of ecology