Re-reading the garden:

Queer ecologies, colonialism, violence

While current theoretical production focusses on ecologies and species extinction as speculation on the future, the question also arises as to how the legacy of the garden as a hortus conclusus can be dealt with. From an art historical perspective, the garden has been comprehensively examined with regard to person-specific, power-analytical and regenerative perspectives, but aesthetic-political questions about gender, the body, coloniality and violence, with which the history of the garden is also closely linked, remain unanswered. It is not only the rule of man over the earth that is up for debate, but also questions of memory and the theorisation of violence in the gardens of visual culture. Plantations on which slaves cultivated gardens, Nazi gardens in which plants were cultivated for sterilisation and botanical gardens that are closely linked to colonial crimes are examples of how gardens in art history are not only associated with different types of power and domination, but also with physical, racial and epistemic violence.

Against this background, we would like to undertake a re-reading of the garden in the workshop. The aim is to update the visual cultural history of the garden against the background of current findings in Holocaust studies, queer and post/decolonial studies and curatorial studies with regard to discourses of post/anthropocene research.