From Friedrich Schiller’s Die Götter Griechenlandes (1788) to Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917), there has been more than a century of emptying nature of “the Gods”, of magic and mystery.  The void that resulted has been restructured with grids of man-made rules and matrixes of evolutionary explanations, rationalisations and intellectualisations. We subsequently had to calculate, not beg the unknown; we had to rationalise, not wait for magic to perform its tricks. The disenchantment (Max Weber) of the world was at work and came with scaling, labelling and standardisations, breaking down, dismantling, and fragmenting.

And then there was the Bauhaus movement ready to dream of and propose a world where craft was art again, where one could find magic beyond threads, and and poetry embedded in architecture.

Unfortunately the outcome was even more “progressive” waste, more industry, and more rules, more void.

 “It is not only the loss of natural resources and altered terrain that we might now be collectively mourning, but also the loss of mystery in places that once seemed so vast and uncharted that we might lose ourselves and find solace, however complex and daunting the journey. How might mystery and the non-quantitative also be restorative? Why do we need to feel this re-enchantment with/in nature and how will we continue to simulate and sustain this engagement as time passes?” ( – Abigail Doan, 2020, environmental artist and writer)

We now talk about and feel hopeful for the “New Bauhaus”.  What precisely do we want it to be? What makes sense for our world? Within this endless horizon that is the vast metaverse, the one certainty we all have is nature and our bare bodies. And then there are all the myths that we weave intbetween, the webs of our dreams. Shifting away from the limitations of linear society and our binary perceptions, we are caught once again in a boomerang of reset. And we set out to start the re-enchantment of the world.

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Memento: Transient Flora (Botanic Garden)

Whenever we touch or pass objects from one person to another, we experience transient contamination with the microbial flora of those objects, i.e. viruses, fungi and bacteria that we share. Flows are changing and fusing together. It is up to us how we maintain balance and harmony with the nature around us. Transient flora is an invitation to contamination.