Fellow Travellers. Art as a Tool to Change the World

Plants as accomplices, gardens as alternative worlds, forests as living archives. Entanglements – volume 4 of the Fellow Travellers series – brings together perspectives that no longer treat technology and nature as opposites, but as entangled systems. Three artistic positions from Europe, China, and South America explore the biological as a form of technology with vast transformative potential: Eva-Maria Lopez examines the colonial mechanisms behind the botanical migration of neophytes through her installation Phyto-Travellers. Since 2000, Zheng Guogu has been developing his Liao Garden in Yangjiang, China, as a living alternative to the world of digital simulation – a fusion of nature, technology, and philosophy. Paulo Tavares, together with anthropologist William Balée, reveals how indigenous communities have actively shaped the Amazon over centuries, and what legal and ecological consequences this recognition carries. Together, these positions expand our understanding of what has been forgotten, what is possible – and what was always there, yet remained invisible.