Plant Space (Territories, Architectures and Technologies of the Vegetal)

How plants shape space, knowledge, and hierarchies across historical, ecological, and epistemic terrains.

Plant Space: Cultures of the Vegetal brings together eighteen international contributors working across critical theory, philosophy, art, design, architecture, and critical ecology to radically reimagine the role of plants in shaping the built environment and its overlapping economies and ecologies. Framed by the entangled histories of extraction, enclosure, and domestication, this volume resituates plants not as passive scenery or symbolic decoration, but as formative presences: agents of spatial composition, political tension, and epistemic possibility. Developed in the context of the exhibition “Bordering Plants” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, essays and experimental formats examine the infrastructures, colonial residues, and aesthetic regimes that render plant life visible, governable, or expendable. From houseplants, the imperial gardens of Vienna, and the global circuits of plant trade, to AI-rendered plants and satellite images in herbicidal warfare, the volume traverses the architectures, imaginaries, and techniques through which vegetal life is organized and resists. Contributors include Elisabeth Bandason, Morgane Billuart, Carla Bobadilla, Laÿna Droz, Carmen Lael Hines, Michelle Howard, Adam Hudec, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Roberto Majano, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Sandro Mezzadra, Michelle Mlati and Pablo Barrios Martínez, Serena Moscardelli, Ido Nahari, Akil Scafe-Smith, Caterina Selva, and Lucia Gregorová Stach. Copublished by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.