"I think the butterflies hate Nature"

Today I have seen the perhaps most purest place of Nature I have ever met. The stones were made of plastic, the trees had thermostats and the artificial plants where sprayed with nutrients for the animal inhabitants.

Nature is of course not what you are taught in school or by advertisement. Nature is the perhaps most fiendish concept ever invented to exploit peoples and environments with. Nature is a central node of a colonialist and extractivist European mind-set – it is perhaps its most well-disguised patriarchal God.

 The place I have encountered with the team of LANDEN (see below) was the „Schmetterlingshaus“ / „Butterfly house“ in central Vienna. It is part of the Hofburg, the old center of imperial power. The exotic butterflies in the glasshouse are imported by airplane from South America every week. After arriving, their cocoons are fixed with a hot glue gun to plastic tree trunks. Most of the butterflies you see in this artificial bubble seem to try to escape it. Their feet actually slip from the exotic, IKEA-like plants provided and so most butterflies you see are actually close to the windows, appearing quite desperate, or on artificial surfaces. No butterfly survives for longer than two weeks here, and you can frequently watch a white child in a state of pure bliss slowly killing a butterfly by mutilating its wing – mostly there is an equally blissful parent right behind filming the entire event of „child being in touch with nature“ with their expansive smartphones.

In old colonial texts you often find the jungle being described as a „green hell“ - it has a weirdly beautiful irony that this recreation of a jungle is hell for its non-human inhabitants. In this glass-house of flickering light, I have recognized an altar for our environmental violence – hidden in plain sight of the city center. 

I think it is important to research and understand this disgusting joy, or joyful disgust being enacted by moderns and tourists there every day. Only if we go through it, recognize it as perhaps the most visible form of this non-recognized Religion of Nature, which is nonetheless in action everywhere else moderns go, only then I think we will have a chance to land somewhere more sustainable. I have come to recognize the "Schmetterlingshaus" as the perfect point of departure for LANDEN - and for everybody that seeks to survive and die better on this planetary catastrophe called the Anthropocene.

The project LANDEN is a new, trans-discipinary and artistic research format based at im_flieger and currently Anita Kaya, Johanna Nielson, Laura Vilar Dolç, Sabrina Rosina and myself are a part of it. We have only started and do not yet have a web presence. But stay tuned, more will come soon for this exciting new project. I am very much looking forward to it.

 

Below you can find a poem I wrote in this temple of slow violence, entitled 

„I think the butterflies hate Nature“

Life on Mars
after the apocalypse
no red sands
but grey smog outside
plants suck
think the butterflies
seek shelter on smooth shapes
of culture

to die, sometime
in this hypernature
most need transcendent portals
to connect
with an idea of everywhere
drops of water from above
from glass surface to glass surface
in enclosed space
is there a longing for solitude
in the unreal waterfalls
with children climbing plastic trees
teaching love for Nature
with hollow sounds
but looking real

Ikea's ideal of home
with life-long warranty
for the involuntarily reproduced
the violence of keeping alive
of not letting die
what we assumed god's land
his old smells so fiercely nice
acid layering the nostrils
sealing them with beauty
that hurts like forced adaption

to the militarily enforced paradise
free from bark beetles and weeds
"let us die!"
the last inhabitants demand
ultimate rallying cry
unheard of by smart ones

please keep the doors shut
to this altar of invisible violence
seek shelter on the one dirty leaf
drown me in electric cascades
i like the challenge
like the touch of death
that my caretakers forbid
ignoring us when we profess
hatred for the natural habitat

all animals unite against it
and yet no one who counts will hear
stay there, be quiet and let us care for you
enjoying pain-free agony
the last most stubborn god
is the former anti-christ
the possessor of women and folk
where all lines of flight eventually meet
the Church of Nature
is the most devouring machine.