Botanica Futura, Botanica Nova

Hortus futuru

 It is seductive to think about the end of the world; to engage in predictions and speculations on all the ways it could spectacularly fall apart, whether it would happen suddenly or gradually, how many small disappearances must occur before the big one, and of course, the inevitable: what comes after? If it were not, we wouldn’t collectively be obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios and the idea of an impending catastrophe, constantly and persistently trying to figure it out and prepare for it. It’s not all that unusual. The world can burn in countless ways, but it is in human nature to desire to predict them all. Unfortunately, the fact that we continuously prepare for a major disaster does not prevent us from causing it ourselves. It seems that we are so frequently confronted with endings and cataclysms that sometimes it truly feels like we are living in a time that can only be called ultimate, yet we remain persistently indifferent, and unaware of our own role and individual responsibility. However, in that fatal passivity, we must be cautious. What is supposed to happen may have already had.

 Colonialisms, financial and extractive capitalism, environmental disasters, pollution, deforestation, fuel combustion and excessive carbon production, global warming, rising ocean temperature, biodiversity of all waters seriously threatened for the first time by new, mysterious pathogens. All these are synonyms for apocalypse, which we refuse to accept and which is essentially a result of the anthropogenic factor, and it is almost impossible to find just one cause for it. In a time when the dominant model of economic interaction and exchange is capitalist, and the ideology of the free market is a perpetuum mobile that keeps us trapped in (self)exploitative practices, capital is the main agent that defines the dynamics of relationships and the new world ecology that connects us all. Capitalocene has brought about the dispersion of responsibilities, polymorphic centres of power, a series of intertwined cause-and-effect relationships and positions where nemesis has long since ceased to be a singular category, but is rather a machinery similar to the mythological Hydra, whose heads are impossible to fully discern.

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