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A Place for Relating to Water
By Lucy Siyao Liu
Are.na Annual 2021 “tend” [link]
Are.na Annual 2021 “tend” [link]
Excerpt
The cosmology of ‘-ariums’ we have built—terrariums, vivariums, planetariums, aquariums, paludariums, ripariums…spell out a technique to comprehend ecosystems by reducing the dimensionality of ecology into controllable scales. We view “-ariums” to be objective section cuts of ecological phenomena; however, our attempts at control also write our presence inextricably into the equation of ideal life conditions that we’re trying to understand. The technology that recreates the conditions for plants and animals, in its simultaneous offering of life, also forks the milieu of non-human environments from their dependence on the specificities of place. Aquariums are not the blackwater streams of the Amazon Basin, and cannot replace the real concerns of that scale. In “On Exactitude of Science,” Jorge Luis Borges warns that in our quest to map the empire in its infinite detail, the map will eventually cover the entire empire itself. Likewise, carefully curated ‘-ariums’ can be misconstrued for the reality of ecosystems themselves; just like how the constructed nature of environmental knowledge can be often misconstrued as the environment itself.
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