Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures

A supplement to the Arcades Project from a Caribbean Perspective [and a call for a careful practice of epistemológica]
Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures is a doctoral work that supplements the unfinished modern opus The Arcades Project. The supplement takes the form of a sculptural, historical, and technological deposition of ‘greenhouse’ that presently oscillates between a past-background and future-foreground to Walter Benjamin's ‘theatrical’ handling of the Parisian arcades.
From my Caribbean perspective, that oscillating treatment of ‘greenhouse’ affords me a prop from which to activate the following question: is colonial memory the drive of Global Warming? That core question has led me to hypothesise that the Roman invention and ensuing manifold instrumentalisation of ‘greenhouse’ plays a primary role in deposing the geological timeline of the Anthropocene.
Through the work, I find that the technology of ‘greenhouse’ is — beyond metaphor — the illusory (dis)embodiment of the toxic binaries of interior & exterior that are still shaping various influential frameworks, such as the modern & Marxian ideas of superstructure, as well as the past & future of Western natural sciences (and their histories). Because of that illusory, spectral, if paranormal power, ‘greenhouse’ becomes at once the Western colonial enframing to both the messianic promise for conserving biological history, as well as the messianic remedy to suppress the traumata that are destining Global Warming.
Altogether, the dissertation revises the so-called forgotten list of ‘Epistemologica’ (the categorical of Western display preparations and phenomenotechnologies). That review aids me to format my experimentation with anxious props and social pedestals as a careful practice that we may share, so to (dis)play more-than-human perspectives that re-mediate the forms and forces of the climate crises.
This is the thesis from the first doctoral candidate to complete his PhD in the KTD programme, a collaborative transdisciplinary programme established in 2015 between Konstfack and The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH in Stockholm.