Herbal Urbanism –
An artistic project on cosmopolitics
Curated by Manray HSU
The anthropogenic global warming and its related environmental crises have raised the issues of shared responsibilities of today’s citizens. The scale of these crises is unprecedented and its sheer impact on the planet has surpassed the tipping point of irreversibility. Hence the declared arrival of Anthropocene now heralded by scientists, theorists, artists and activists around the world. Humans are no longer seen as beyond other species, existing as a collective that pursues its own freedom and economic growth, but rather as a geological agent that has reshaped the planet Earth and profoundly changed the environment.
Herbal Urbanism is conceived as a long-term artistic project, to take place in different cities. Using a diversity of formats ranging from exhibition, performance, screening, conference, publication, fieldwork, etc., the project explores new relationships between human and nature in the era of anthropocene. We start with avoiding an anthropocentric view of nature as resources to be utilized for human welfare, The presumption is that the unitary conception of nature in modern sciences should be abandoned for a multiplicity of cosmos, and that indeed, a cosmopolitics of multinaturalism shall be practiced to explore the new possible relationships between human and nature. In this artistic project, old and new, existing and experimental views of cosmos will be brought into the realm of art production, debate and practice.
Conventionally, the city is thought of as a site where civilisation has emerged and evolved. Based on the division of culture and nature, the city as a living being emerged out of a system of metabolism which consists of interrelated infrastructures such as roads, communication, aqueducts, food and garbage processing facilities which allow urban circulation and governance. Yet, since the Industrial Revolution, urbanization has gradually evolved into an intricate network covering the whole earth. In this process of planetary urbanization, infrastructure has become the cause, not simply a result, of the exchange between human and nature. Infrastructure, in fact, becomes itself a part of nature. Through the ever expanding scale of development in building Autostrada, railroad, air travel facilities, seafare, telecommunication, sanitation and food systems, namely, cyborg urbanization, the city since the second of the twentieth century has turned into a hybrid, social assemblage. The cities are products and producers of Anthropocene.
If we consider the city as a site for experimenting and practising new relationships between human and nature, and current ecological problems as inseparable from urbanization and the life of the city, then we also have difficulties in that modern urban dwellers are typically inward-looking, neglecting the symbiosis between the city and its larger ecosystem, its Umwelt. It is in this vein that Herbal Urbanism is concerned not only with ecologies inside the city, but with wider, even planetary issues of the environment. Cities as sites of multiplicity, conflict, and hybridity, offer themselves for cosmopolitics.
Herbalism, or Pentsaology, is the pharmaceutic branch in Chinese medicine. Even though the term implies the study of botanic knowledge, it focuses on Materia Medica, including various objects from mineral, plant and animal (and even human body), and throughout centuries has developed into a series of pharmacopedia, indeed encyclopaedia (＊). As part of the Chinese medicine, it represents the Chinese cosmology of Qi, Ying-Yang, the Five Agents, and embodies a different relationship between human and nature from modern medical science. As a project on cosmopolitics, Herbal Urbanism attempts to bring different cosmologies, as well as various disciplines with their ontology and epistemology, into encounter with each other, and to explore possible cosmos by linking artistic activist work to various political ecological concerns.
＊Charles Darwin called Li Shi-Zhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica from the Ming Dynasty, a Chinese encyclopaedia.
Quotation:
"If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems… The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs.”
—— Matthew Gandy, "Cyborg Urbanization - Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City," 2005）
Herbal Urbanism is conceived as a long-term artistic project, to take place in different cities. Using a diversity of formats ranging from exhibition, performance, screening, conference, publication, fieldwork, etc., the project explores new relationships between human and nature in the era of anthropocene. We start with avoiding an anthropocentric view of nature as resources to be utilized for human welfare, The presumption is that the unitary conception of nature in modern sciences should be abandoned for a multiplicity of cosmos, and that indeed, a cosmopolitics of multinaturalism shall be practiced to explore the new possible relationships between human and nature. In this artistic project, old and new, existing and experimental views of cosmos will be brought into the realm of art production, debate and practice.
Conventionally, the city is thought of as a site where civilisation has emerged and evolved. Based on the division of culture and nature, the city as a living being emerged out of a system of metabolism which consists of interrelated infrastructures such as roads, communication, aqueducts, food and garbage processing facilities which allow urban circulation and governance. Yet, since the Industrial Revolution, urbanization has gradually evolved into an intricate network covering the whole earth. In this process of planetary urbanization, infrastructure has become the cause, not simply a result, of the exchange between human and nature. Infrastructure, in fact, becomes itself a part of nature. Through the ever expanding scale of development in building Autostrada, railroad, air travel facilities, seafare, telecommunication, sanitation and food systems, namely, cyborg urbanization, the city since the second of the twentieth century has turned into a hybrid, social assemblage. The cities are products and producers of Anthropocene.
If we consider the city as a site for experimenting and practising new relationships between human and nature, and current ecological problems as inseparable from urbanization and the life of the city, then we also have difficulties in that modern urban dwellers are typically inward-looking, neglecting the symbiosis between the city and its larger ecosystem, its Umwelt. It is in this vein that Herbal Urbanism is concerned not only with ecologies inside the city, but with wider, even planetary issues of the environment. Cities as sites of multiplicity, conflict, and hybridity, offer themselves for cosmopolitics.
Herbalism, or Pentsaology, is the pharmaceutic branch in Chinese medicine. Even though the term implies the study of botanic knowledge, it focuses on Materia Medica, including various objects from mineral, plant and animal (and even human body), and throughout centuries has developed into a series of pharmacopedia, indeed encyclopaedia (＊). As part of the Chinese medicine, it represents the Chinese cosmology of Qi, Ying-Yang, the Five Agents, and embodies a different relationship between human and nature from modern medical science. As a project on cosmopolitics, Herbal Urbanism attempts to bring different cosmologies, as well as various disciplines with their ontology and epistemology, into encounter with each other, and to explore possible cosmos by linking artistic activist work to various political ecological concerns.
＊Charles Darwin called Li Shi-Zhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica from the Ming Dynasty, a Chinese encyclopaedia.
Quotation:
"If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems… The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs.”
—— Matthew Gandy, "Cyborg Urbanization - Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City," 2005）
