Nature is not under threat of destruction. We are. Astonishingly, we continue to describe the on-going environmental crisis as a natural disaster, in the sense that it’s destroying our surroundings rather than ourselves. Efforts have been made to change the focal point, to re-direct our gaze, and to open our eyes to a more unbearable reality – nature will survive climate change. It is modern culture that is dependent on a stable scenery. We should be beyond this binary by now – nature and culture are not antonyms. They intersect and blend, they are co-dependent. Maybe the distinction isn’t even valid, maybe it distracts us from experiencing the complexity of the non-human world, and with it our humanity.

« How do you feel yourself and how do you feel the world? » are central questions in the ecosophy of Arne Næss. In a letter to his friend and colleague Per Ingvar Haukland, Næss argues the importance of us acquiring the ability to feel the world, and in so doing rekindling with our environments. Describing his relationship to nature – in this case how he as a child would try to connect with non-human cohabitants of our world, and how he, at a later stage of his life, feels one with the flowers, trees, and mountains surrounding his beloved cabin home at Tvergastein – he goes on to challenge the idea of an absolute divide between his own being, and that of the world:

«The world and I are not that far away from one another, perhaps the distance between us is not thicker than the paper of a cigarette (…) resembling a flux [more] than anything solid».

Næss was a passionate advocate of positive ecosophy – he believed that we – humans – held the key to create a more constructive development for the planet by altering our understanding of other living things. In our present-day state of hopelessness, many might perceive this as naïve, but where has the realistic pessimism latent in modern [enlightened] thinking led us, other than endless exploitation of all living things?

Aside from his writing, Næss was also an eager hiker – or what one in Norwegian would coin as a friluftsliventusiast – an enthusiast of the outdoors life. In many ways, it was this entry point that enabled his thoughts on nature to go beyond the academic circles and penetrate the public discourse in Norway of the late 1970s. Norwegians are obsessed with friluftsliv – skiing, climbing mountains, and following tracks through various national parks all year round. At the same time, the Norwegian economy has always been dependent on the destruction of the landscape which in many ways is at the core of national identity. This goes beyond the oil of the North Sea, which may be described as the backbone of the Norwegian welfare state. For centuries we have been tearing down our forests and polluting our surroundings to the point where there’s almost nothing left: every hour an area of nature equal in size to a football field is being destroyed. Simultaneously, Norway exceeds any other nation in the consumption of sports and hiking equipment per capita.

Departing from this tragic irony, Nikhil Vettukattil and Gabriel Alonso have taken the body of a tent and reconstructed it to fit Podium’s exhibition space. The high-tech tent that has served as a template for the various works of the exhibition points to our contradictory relationship to nature – how can we so eagerly destroy what we hold so dear? On the other hand, the tent also points back to alternative ways of living with nature – ones that make less permanent alterations to their surroundings. The tent is an image of both leisure and survival; it houses the figures of the explorer, the homeless, the scientist, the nomad, and ever increasingly, the refugee. By the expansion of agriculture, modern societies have colonized the land, the forests, the fields, and the animals. With industrialization, we took the rivers, and the oceans, and more recently we’ve been set on conquering the sky and space too. Our very concept of civilization suddenly appears as irrevocably barbaric. Through the remaking of the tent, the artists are questioning this status quo – this is not our only option, we can instead organize ourselves differently. There is in every moment an opportunity to interact with nature, and with each other, in less harmful ways.

The colonial ties inherent in the human-nature relationship is most obvious in the field of traditional botany, through which we have sorted and mapped nature in our self referential image. By imposing our own bias on other living things we have reduced the world of plants to binaries – male and female, toxic and edible, useful and useless. They are serving our needs. Not unlike the arts, or any other academic discipline for that matter, the imperialistic backbone of botany reveals itself immediately in the established institutions. When visiting the Victoria House of the University of Oslo Botanical Garden at Tøyen, one finds oneself surrounded by displaced tropical plants that are not at home amongst Norwegian flora and would not be able to survive outside of the constructed environment of the greenhouse. In the world of museums, there’s constant debate on the ethics of displaying – what is in many cases stolen – artifacts. How do botanical gardens fit into this? How long should these plants be contained in artificial environments?

Capitalism and the mass consumption it necessitates are rapidly making other living species – plants and animals – extinct. Paradoxically, this has made the botanical gardens not solely sites of showcasing botany, but also sites of protection that make – small, but nonetheless significant – halfway homes and campsites from the destruction caused by our ways of life. The greenhouses become safe spaces, shelters, and tents for the plants. They are protective, but also reductive in the sense that they are forcing these plants to live as hothouse flowers – a term used to describe one who has been nurtured in privileged conditions, too fragile for the real world outside. Blinded by the greed of our kind and the systems we have built, we too may end up like this – forced to live in artificial environments, where the borders between us and the world grow too thick for us to feel our surroundings, and so also, ourselves.