Presentation at the art exhibition of the group ‘open lines – art research on coexixtence’, RFD Insel Artspace Innsbruck, Oct. 2024
Is there a fundamental flaw in our Western thinking that has led us into the current complex crisis of climate change, loss of biodiversity and scarcity of resources? What can we do, what must we do to come to terms with nature and its great, overarching cycles in a densely populated world? Because this is entirely possible if we make a number of adjustments to our living conditions… including for urban life: the dense city can become nature, in whose great, overarching context we integrate: the city as a biotope, Biotope City.
Disasters have accompanied the history of mankind. The great disaster par excellence is at the very beginning of our Western world view: the Great Flood. God wants to wipe out humankind and destroy all life on earth with them because man has proven to be evil and violent. Only one person should escape destruction, the righteous Noah. He and all the animals with him are to be saved . God gives him precise instructions on how to do this: build a huge ark and take one pair of each animal with him. After that, incessant rain begins, the water rises steadily and finally covers the entire earth for 150 days, up to the highest mountain peaks.
Look at the picture – do you notice anything? What is missing from the rescue operation? The plants!
150 days under water – no land plant can survive that. The consequence: total destruction of all life on land, including all plants. The result would be that all life on earth would have to start anew, except for that in the seas. Life on land without land plants: impossible! It is quite obvious that the Bible text was not written by a gardener …
But there is more to it than that, and it will have a highly problematic effect on the rest of the story. And this is linked to another questionable passage in the biblical story: Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise. They are supposed to subdue the earth. This lays the foundation for a questionable world view: man will see himself as the crown of creation and as the measure of measure of all things.
This view of man shows a top-down view of nature. Man has the God-given right to rule over the earth. The absence of plants in Noah’s rescue operation indicates a fundamental misunderstanding that continues to be perpetuated in the stream of Western thought about the world. The lowest level is that of plants, they are no longer perceived as anything other than material objects.
I would describe this as a central problem that has persisted to the present day, permeating Western religions in their various forms, as well as philosophies and social theories, and which has also led to a narrowing of horizons in science for a long time. Only in art can we find an almost tender attention to this neglected lowest level in the hierarchy of life on earth. The representation of plants in reliefs, in Dürer’s aquarelles, in paintings and even in the wonderful Gobelins of the 16th century show this.
What is completely missing is the recognition of the existential connection between the different forms of life, in which plants play a central role. The coexistence of all life does not penetrate into our consciousness as an essential background to our existence.
The path from the biblical world view to a secular world view that can ultimately recognise this and also name it factually is also a difficult one.
The first steps in the quasi-discovery of man’s self can be found in the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci examined the species with and dissecting knife to the point of
It takes until the 16th and 17th centuries – until what we call modern times – for man to begin to define himself independently of the biblical order. We are all familiar with a quote from Descartes: ‘Man is the crown of creation. He can think. He has consciousness of himself,’ a and reason is his instrument of action.
Descartes goes even further than the world view of the Bible: he divides the world into subject and object, into the category of ‘mental existence’, that is man – and into the category ‘object’ for the rest. The category ‘object’ is at our unconditional disposal.
It became famous that, as a consequence, Descartes also regarded animals as mere objects without any feelings, as quasi machines.
Despite all modifications, this view of animals in science remains largely unchanged until well into the 20th century. Feelings are denied to animals and only described as projections of pet owners and animal lovers. Plants are denied feelings anyway – and that until the recent past.
The next leap in knowledge began a century later and concerned morality: when people no longer want to simply refer to the Ten Commandments, they have to formulate rules for themselves. The human community also needs moral rules of the game. This culminates in the beautiful quote from Kant: ‘The categorical imperative is a single one, and that is this: act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it become a general law’.
This leads to ever more differentiated law and legislation. But for a long time this applies exclusively to humans. We have human rights. Only very have only recently been developed in the meantime.
The consequences of the human being being at the centre are lasting, but not in the sense of sustainability: the liberated, independent individual acts in his or her own interest, which only has its limits in the legally protected interests of other human legal entities. The categories of property, market, capital and competition become important. Theorists such as Ricardo and Adam Smith elaborate on this, and Karl Marx analyses the underlying mechanisms of capital, labour and surplus value, thereby identifying the social downside. Everything is judged in terms of its usefulness for us humans in the free market and, if necessary, pruned. In principle, we are still attached to the liberalism of the free market of free individuals to this day in this world of thought and world view.
But that has tangible, fatal consequences that we are now experiencing. It has led us into a dead end : the series of manifest crises indicates this. There have always been crises in the past. But now they have become global, they can be felt and seen everywhere in the world: global population explosion with an increasingly threatening scarcity of natural resources, dramatic decline in biodiversity, daily large-scale clearing of forests , our green lungs, and last but not least, as a result of climate change.
When books with such a title appear on the market, the alarm bells ring!
As in the 16th and 17th centuries, now it is becoming clear that we have to revise some things in our world view – but now much more profoundly!
What does that mean? A new world view does not emerge overnight. It takes time for it to crystallises, and even more time for it to become widespread.
Incidentally, the division into the three epochs that I have mentioned comes from an essay by Jean Paul Sartre. It is not unusual in itself; it is quite common. What is interesting, however, is how Sartre describes the emergence of a new, changed view of the world: namely, from the bottom up, from the empirical experience of changes made in the everyday lives of many people .
In the face of new experiences, old interpretations become questionable. People look for new explanations. Tangible, physically perceptible necessity accelerates the search for other solutions, which underpins new insights. In science, work is being done on solving problems.
Finally, these insights are taken up in social theories and in philosophies. This ultimately leads to the existing view of the world world is adapted and changed. Finally, some theoreticians prevail in the discourse. Their interpretation is increasingly taken up by society until it finally becomes the new dominant world view.
We are currently in the middle of such a process, or at least at the beginning.
Let’s take a look at some important pioneers of the current upheaval of our world view: in science, in philosophy and art. People who have antennae into the future, beyond the ,Zeitgeist,.
Let’s start with the antennae in science and philosophy. I mention the rather unknown Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician and philosopher. Most of you will never have heard the name before or only in connection with Henri Bergson, with whom he was friends and from whom he learned a great deal. I only came across him through Bergson.
Whitehead contradicted Descartes’ idea that reality is constructed from two fixed categories of existence, an exclusively material existence and an exclusively mental existence, and that these two forms of existence, i.e. object and subject, exist completely independently of each other.
Whitehead put forward the thesis that objects and subjects are processual, that is, they are not fixed objects and subjects, but that they are in a process of constant change.
This was revolutionary, a breakthrough in thinking with far-reaching consequences. Whitehead’s metaphysical system was referred to as process philosophy – but this also separated it from the mainstream of philosophy and largely shelved it.
With exceptions:
Process philosophy was further developed by Bruno Latour, among others, in actor-network theory. This theory rejects the juxtaposition of fixed active subjects and passive objects. Actor-network theory argues that it is much more a matter of networks of relationships, and that non-human actors also have the potential for action within a network. These non-human actors are called ‘actants’. Such a network can consist of actants of different types and origins and include different forms of matter and life. How do these actants communicate with each other? The term material-semiotic has been developed for this: ‘material’ is supposed to include everything that does not proceed by means of what we humans call language. What does that mean? This also has far-reaching consequences.
I quote the philosopher Anna Tsing from her book about the Matsutake mushroom and its interactive relationship with the world:
‘…you could say that pine trees, matsutake mushrooms and humans cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s ‘projects for shaping the world’ possible. This phrase prompted me to think about how landscapes in general are products of unintentional design, that is, products of the intersecting world-shaping activities of many human and non-human actors. The design is clearly visible in the landscape ecosystem. But none of the actors planned this effect. As the setting for dramas involving more than just humans, landscapes are radical tools for de-centring human hubris. Landscapes are not merely backdrops for historical action: they are active themselves. The observation of the emergence of landscapes shows that humans, together with other other creatures.’
I repeat the sentence ‘As arenas for not only human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for de-centring human hubris.’ Did we not experience this a month ago in Austria and neighbouring countries?
In the context of the experience of the destruction of our planet through the subjugation of all forms of nature to humans, this leads to the realisation, or, to put it dramatically, to the logical conclusion that the world view of so-called modernity has failed. That is, the unlimited rule of humans over creation on the basis of liberal and neoliberal legitimisation of his actions has failed, and what is more, that it leads to self-destruction through the destruction of its own foundations of life and those of other forms of life, and has already done so to a large extent.
Such considerations, as presented by Anna Tsing, are a breeding ground for scientific empirical observations of plants and animals, as they have been made in recent decades, for example, by Stefano Mancuso and Frans de Waal, among others, have made in recent decades.
The Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso started from the following observation, which was passed on to him from ecology: plants are the basis for all other forms of life on our planet – after all, they produce the air we breathe and regulate the CO2 , the amount of rain and the temperature of the earth.
Based on this initial observation, Mancuso placed plants at the centre of his investigations into their world of experience, that is, the world of experience of plants. He made exciting observations about their intelligence, an intelligence nota bene without a brain. He proved that plants have a social life and are capable of social behaviour even with other varieties . They hear and speak and have their own language.
Primatologist and behavioural scientist Frans de Waal calls for a fundamental rethinking of our view of animals. They have the same abilities for compassion, grief, love, shame, morality as we do. He writes: ‘The only difference between us is that we can express our feelings in language ; we can talk about our feelings’.
And then his conclusion, again quoted: ’If animals have feelings, and that includes lobsters and bees, then we have to take their interests into account morally. If you recognise emotions in animals, including the sentience of insects, then it becomes morally relevant’.
The French philosopher Bruno Latour has consistently postulated – and in mutual confirmation, Mancuso also does so – that, consequently, not only humans should be recognised as legal entities, but that this should also be granted to plants, animals and, even more so, to entire complex communities of life. For example, the North Sea, which, with its diversity of plant and animal animal creatures as a self-sustaining community. He says – and this sentence could be used as an epigraph to this essay: ‘What the world needs is a new look at the relationship between humans and non-humans, with new concepts and images.’
Latour then logically explains that these various forms of legal entities must be entitled to participate on an equal footing in negotiating a just system of distribution, and that a legal system is needed to define this.
The first approaches to this can be seen, for example, in international agreements for the protection of seas or in the establishment of protection for national parks. In the Netherlands, there is a movement that was actually , which wants to enforce the recognition of the North Sea as a legal entity.
The Italian-French philosopher Emanuele Coccia has written a book ‘La vie des plantes – une metaphysique du mélange’ as a consequence of this, which has become known in broader circles and has been translated into many languages. His central statement is:
They open up a different view of the world that demands different maxims for action. It requires a modified, or better yet, an expanded ethic. On this basis, we must lead people back to their embeddedness in the great cyclical connections of life. He writes: ‘Western has theorised in a way that turns reality on its head. Man is not the crown of creation; we humans and other forms of animal life are rather dependent on what plants provide us with.”
These are far-reaching statements !
Let us turn to art. Here, there are equally exciting antennae into the future.
I don’t need to tell you anything more about Donna Haraway – you all know her, she was proclaimed the most influential woman in the art world by the magazine Monopol in 2021. She proclaimed the Cyber Manifesto and thus anticipated a future that we are now seeing in our reality, but with much more disturbing signs.
The works of the group ‘open lines – art research on coexistence’ are based on the realisation that we as humans must see ourselves in a larger context of life – and this without the utilitarian attitude that determines the actions of our western industrialised species. Here some of their works
From the exhibition: works and text by Nora Schöpfer: “…in many places, new images of reality are beginning to emerge: endless networks of the development of all forms of life, the folding in of space, matter and time, of connections and relationships – a network of kinship and equivalence of all life forms becomes conceivable and our exalted position as thinking observers and determinants of an “outside world” loses its relevance. …an oscillating idea becomes possible, which throws thinking out of time, dissolves the boundaries of bodies, frees them from fixed definitions and overlays spaces: Following this vision, in the series common space I combine fragmentary elements in layers to form a fabric of the living, and in doing so I also consider those processes of perception that, coloured by experience and conditioning, generate ever new and variable realities in a rhizomatic way:
… an imagination of transient relationality, which appeals to tolerance for the other in the same as well as to responsibility for our concepts of thought and also wants to point out their limitations.
In the series common space, I use painting, graphics and collage to form structures and forms of life, such as veins, heart vessels, root networks, branches and treetops, technological systems, signs and concepts, as well as pure colour surfaces, representing the immaterial empty spaces of being, outside of our thinking, towards a fictitious transgression of current ideas about bodies and their limits, about the spaces of existence and their interrelations and dynamics. With a visual fabric of expanded interdependencies and ideas, an experimental space for thought is affirmed, in an attempt to break open the images of familiar perspectives, dualistic separations and distance.“
In the meantime, art has put out feelers into yet another dimension of coexistence: the micro level.
Allow me to quote a sentence by Sonja Bäumel, which she wrote as the preface to an essay that appeared in a book entitled ‘DOORS TO HIDDEN WORLDS’, which was out of print immediately. It was the catalogue for an exhibition in Rotterdam in 2023. This exhibition demonstrated the exchange between artists and scientific disciplines. ‘To be in the world as an individual actually means to be a multi-existential community in a vital process of permanent exchange’. Sonja Bäumel made these discoveries in her collaboration with biochemists, which led her into the largely unknown micro-worlds – with almost frightening insights: billions of micro-organisms live in us, on us and directly around our bodies. Each and every one of us a whole planet teeming with life!
But now I want to remind you of a great pioneer in the field of art, an Austrian who was vilified for a long time, who proclaimed and called for a world view and behaviour that is only now becoming more widely accepted: Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser wrote a whole series of manifestos whose foresight has only recently become clear. It begins with two manifestos against the approaching throwaway consumption that one would like to put under all of our pillows today. And this as early as 1957 and 1958. From 1970, a veritable cascade of manifestos followed.
Take a look at the topics of these manifestos – his farsighted antennae into the future are astounding.
In the 1950s, it was the approaching consumerism that prompted him to write manifestos:
1957 – a manifesto against throwaway consumption; 1958 – the mouldiness manifesto
From 1970, a veritable cascade of manifestos followed:
1971 – the overgrowth of cities: “…roofs must be forested as well as the streets. In the city, you have to be able to breathe forest air again. The earth must be covered with vegetation, from house wall to house wall, traffic can very well be handled in arcades.”
1971 – Tree tenants: “…a tree or several trees should grow out of the windows. The tree tenant pays his rent through oxygen, through its dust-swallowing capacity as an anti-noise machine, through the generation of calm, through poison removal, through the cleaning of contaminated rainwater as a producer of happiness and health, as a butterfly bringer and through beauty and many other currencies
What can such visionary insights of coexistence with all forms of life mean for us, for our own lives, for our own daily existence?
Hundertwasser’s manifestos all contain demands that today, 50 years later, are proclaimed in all media. These demands are also increasingly being put into practice. Citizens are getting involved in recycling and repair groups. The tree obligation has not only led to an exquisite building for the super-rich, the Bosco vertica le in Milan. In Eindhoven in the Netherlands, a Bosco verticale has already been built as a social housing project.
Many municipalities have started planting additional trees in urban areas. In many places, grass is allowed to grow between tramlines, wild greenery in the joints of public , the fire protection for green facades is being re-examined and, where possible, mitigated .
I don’t want to focus on mitigating climate change through greening. Hopefully, this has been known for a long time.
Rather, I am concerned with the overall context of living things, in which green forms an important building block. And it is about how we can fit into this context with our everyday activities and the way we construct our living conditions – in the sense of coexistence. We as urban people – because the future will become more and more urban. In an urban environment.
City and nature, once seen as opposites, will inevitably have to be combined. And that is very possible – and makes our lives healthier, more beautiful and richer.
What are the consequences for architecture, urban renewal and urban development?
The fact that the coexistence of Homo sapiens, flora and fauna is possible, and if it is not prevented, will often take place by itself and can be additionally and purposefully supported with little, even the smallest, effort – this can be observed in existing urban areas. Just think just think of the inventiveness of birds when it comes to building a nest. Here are some examples from Paris, from Amsterdam and from a small town in the south of Germany near the Rhine.
I live in the centre of Amsterdam, in the so-called canal belt. I have been watching from my windows to the canal and to the inner and noted which birds I saw there. On the list of Central European songbirds (which, zoologically, also includes those that do not sing at all), which you can see below, I marked in yellow what I saw. There are, believe it or not, 32 different species, including even rare ones like an oriole. So cohabitation has been taking place for a long time, quite independently from birdhouses hung by people.
The same cohabitation also applies to plants. Wild growth everywhere, wherever possible! As soon as municipalities fail to regularly remove this plant wild growth, plants of a wide variety can be found in all, even the smallest cracks, a wide variety of plants can be found. These often include rare species that are on the red list and should actually be nurtured and protected.
A Dutch botanist has commendably presented this diversity in a handbook of urban wild growth in the Netherlands. He calls for writing the name on the ground in front of it with chalk to make these special features its beauty, to a wider audience.
In fact, there are now groups of residents in many communities who are dedicated to the protection of wild growth. In some cities, the municipal council has also decided to actively support greening in public spaces. Tree disc plantings are supported, sponsorships are ships are awarded, as in Paris, and even fencing is provided on request, as in Vienna.
In terms of trees in urban areas, the realisation that foliage helps to mitigate climate change and reduce summer temperatures has led many municipalities to planting additional trees in existing urban areas, as underground conditions permit. Residents’ aversion to shading by trees, which only occurs in summer and is therefore now quite welcome, and to leaf fall in autumn, which in the past was often due to “pollution when it rains” dirty when it rains’ was a good reason to demand that the municipality remove the trees.
Coexistence with other forms of life, which has a continuous form from the past in existing cities, can also be achieved when building new urban quarters. As a prime example and model of a highly dense new quarter, I would like to present Biotope City Wienerberg, at Vienna, a pilot project for the International Building Exhibition Vienna 2022, which has now been completed and occupied for 3 1/2 years.
The district, built on a site of 5.4 ha that was once almost 100% sealed with halls and a car park, is as dense as the districts of the 19th century in European cities, in planning language floor area ratio GFZ 3.0, a residential area with almost 1,000 apartments, of which 2/3 are in social housing, plus community facilities, a school, shops and restaurants, offices and a hotel. Nevertheless, after completion, only 40% of the area is sealed! The neighbourhood is car-free, with parking spaces under the large buildings and in the open space, playgrounds with lawns, but also meadows with a wide variety of small-flowered plants for insects. In addition to all this, native varieties of 289 trees have been planted, which can grow up to 30 m high and provide shade in the hot Viennese summer.
Let’s take a walk through the neighbourhood:
Exiting are the rooftops of the buildings with their rich gardens.
So it turns out that even a high-density new neighbourhood can be a natural environment, a place where different types of trees, shrubs and meadows coexist for insects and birds, and where people can enjoy green spaces with playgrounds and benches. This project in Vienna has shown that two-thirds of such a neighbourhood can be built in two-thirds of the social housing and the construction costs do not have to exceed the usual range.
I have put together a few rules for building such neighbourhoods here. You can find a detailed guide on the Biotope City Journal website under the title ‘Building Instructions for a Climate-Resilient, Green and Nature-Inclusive City .
Voilà, let’s move towards an urban future in coexistence with the realm of other forms of life that nature offers us !
