By Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox

  

«PARA GARDENS» is a digital surface that reflects on the erotic aspect of our ecological existence. Being alive is an erotic process--constantly transforming the self through contact with other organisms. There is the desire to be touched, to be connected, to be alive within the natural system. The disregard of those needs lie at the core of the global crisis and the belief that the world is a dead mechanism controlled by economic efficiency.

This work is inspired by contemporary biologist & eco-philosopher Andreas Weber and his book “Matter and Desires: an Erotic Ecology”, where he suggests that we live in a meshwork of relationships in which we need one another to be fully alive (and to experience our inwardness). Put simply, every matter desires to be in contact with another and this desire is translated through a surface that is able to caress another.

“In contrast to an object or a machine, a body regularly splits off a part of itself in order to survive and incorporates a piece of the foreign world into itself. This is precisely why it is wrong to compare a life-form with a machine: a machine does not metabolize. The fuel that I put into the tank burns but does not transform itself into another body.”

Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox in virtual collaboration construct a digital space, which represents a network of different planted bodies and matter found/ imagined in the wilderness of Leipzig and Amman. What do we give and what do we take within our inner and outer nature? “Para-Gardens” is a video work that visualises the poetic tenderness of different ecological beings and their mutual erotic attraction.