In Flying Gardens, Tillandsias plants, resilient aerial plants without roots that get their water and nutrients from the air, remind us that the terrestrial and the celestial are, in fact, one, not separated but united in a life cycle and shared space. Tillandsias, who grow wherever conditions allow, feeding themselves with the water, nutrients, and sunlight they find in the ocean of air, remind us that our atmosphere is teeming with life, not empty but full.
The air itself has been reminding us of this itself lately, with sky-high rates of air pollution and global warming revealing what happens when we upset its balance—not only internally, but its balance within the larger environment, with the ocean, the earth and the cosmos, as well. Fogs of pollution and capsized icebergs act as elemental warning cries linked to our delusive mastery of the environment—we must free the air from particulate matter. In his 2018 book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour speaks directly to this elemental mutiny, asking, “How are we to act if the territory itself begins to participate in history, to fight back, in short, to concern itself with us—how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?” The answer is that we must recognize it as an agent, and discard a colonial framework of “occupation,” seeking instead a collaboration with this actor. To create Flying Gardens or a Cloud City is not to abandon the terrestrial territory we have come to fear, not to ignore Latour’s suggestion that we remain “down to earth”; instead, it is an attempt to inhabit the air differently—as we understand it to be part of one system with the other environmental elements—and in doing so reattune with the planet and air with which we live. This reattunement necessitates futures of living predicated on union. Aerial plants like the Tillandsias remind us that there are, in fact, no natural divisions— even the “distinct” elements of soil, water, and air are inexorably intertwined in reality—and that solidarity is a prerequisite for survival.

Plants exhibit this solidarity against divisions within themselves, as well; in conversations with the artist, Italian plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso explained that, as stationary beings, plants have had to adapt a balance with their environment—including with their predators, from whom they are not able to run—through a dispersal of organic functions throughout their entire bodies; instead of discrete organs with specialised functions—brain for thinking, lungs for breathing, stomach for digesting, etc.—these mechanisms are made uniformly diffuse across the plant. An animal model of distinct organs would leave the plant completely vulnerable, dying as soon as the first critter came along to eat even a small portion of the plant. Survival for the plant is dependent upon decentralization, a principle it also applies outside its body into community relations; after centuries of failures stemming from hierarchy and disunion, we find our survival is dependent upon it, as well.

This dispersal of function recalls the spider/web, whose form is also evoked in the knotted cords binding Flying Gardens’s glass spheres: for web-building spiders, their web is an instrument for vibrational communication, the architecture of which is acutely attuned to the vibrational tremors that pass through it, and through which the spider sends signals to sense the environment. Evolutionary biologists Hilton Japyassú and Kevin Laland even propose that the web not only extends the spider’s senses, but also its cognition, as it offloads cognitive tasks to its web, trusting it to “think through” the signals it receives.