Art Academy of Latvia (K2 building)
Noelia BILLI. Open-Air Laboratories: Plant Aesthetics, Ecological Maps, and the Politics of World-Making
This talk will address the ambivalent figure of the “open-air laboratory,” understood as a site where technoscientific experimentation, ecological processes, and political struggles intersect. It explores plants as ecological maps that mediate between regimes of biovigilance and capitalist extraction, while also enabling alliances for imagining more habitable worlds. Particular attention is given to the aesthetic dimension of these practices, where images operate as affective membranes and imagination as a compositional force. Drawing on debates on plant intelligence, soil aesthetics, and visual regimes, the analysis highlights aesthetics as a field of ecological and political emergence.
Noelia Billi (Argentina), with Bachelor and Doctorate degrees in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires, is a lecturer in Philosophical Anthropology and an Associate Researcher at CONICET. Her work primarily explores posthuman materialism, with a dedicated focus on critical ecologies and the vegetal logics of existence.