ABSTRACT
For millennia a way to redeem nature from its ever-impending chaos, gardens play a key role in the survival strategy that art and culture can offer during the “age of the human.” Yet, not all these strategies are the same: some of them, in fact, conceal forms of wildness and disorder that are rooted in systems of social oppression, resource exploitation, and the disruption of planetary cycles. Taking the cue from Gardens of the Anthropocene by eco-artist Tamiko Thiel, the Parco Arte Vivente in Turin and the Japanese gardens described by Italo Calvino in his Collection of Sand, this essay reflects on the entanglements between art, media and the becoming-geological of the human. In this framework, and thought with the Anthropocene, the garden is a lens to analyze the impact of old and new forms of aestheticization of nature on the geology of our planet, focusing on the landscapes of power and depletion, but also on the territories of resistance and creativity emerging from it.
