Luis Berríos-Negrón

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Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures

Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures is a doctoral work that supplements the unfinished modern opus The Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk]. The supplement takes the form of a sculptural, historical, and technological deposition of 'greenhouse' that presently oscillates between a past-background and future-foreground to Walter Benjamin's 'theatrical' handling of the Parisian arcades. From Berríos-Negrón's Caribbean perspective, that oscillating treatment of 'greenhouse' affords a prop from which to activate the following question: is colonial memory the drive of Global Warming? That core question has led to retrospectively hypothesise that the technology of 'greenhouse' is—beyond metaphor—the illusory (dis)embodiment of the toxic binaries of interior & exterior that are still shaping Western technological frameworks, no less the natural sciences (and their histories). Because of that illusory, spectral, if paranormal power, 'greenhouse' becomes at once the Western colonial enframing to both the messianic promise for conserving biological history, as well as the messianic remedy to suppress the traumata that are destining Global Warming. That potent (dis)embodied character leads Berríos-Negrón to set 'greenhouse' as primary site to the geological timeline of the Anthropocene, as well as research specimen for a careful, life-affirming study and practice of object-relations and display he calls epistemológica.