The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 FRIEDERIKE NASTOLD The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives The garden is inherently performative and a heterotopic place. As an ecosystem en miniature and a scene of the Anthropocene, the garden is simultaneously host to human and more-than-human communities and to (neo-colonial) narratives of violence. This simultaneity is exemplified in the Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) by Hieronymus Bosch, in Tejal Shah’s Between the Waves (2012), and in gardens that are showcased as part of the Venice Biennale Arte (2022 and 2024). In the context of queer ecologies, the plants and gardens within these works function as green archives and disturbances to dissolve hegemonic binaries and offer alternative world designs. Anthropocene Queer Ecologies Humanimals Heterotopia Archive Performative Arts Planetary Worlding Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Opening Thoughts “Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations. Its favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along disturbed edges.”1 In this story about planting sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist and member of the Potawatomi Indigenous community, is quoted at the beginning and makes two interesting points for my reflections on the performativity of the garden. Firstly, she talks about the role of people, generations, temporality, and nature. Secondly, she mentions the framework conditions that sweetgrass needs to grow. A complex set of relationships emerges in the simultaneous consideration of the actors mentioned, which will be examined in more detail below. In her dialogue with sweetgrass, Kimmerer also speaks of a wounded earth. “It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.”2 According to Kimmerer, a “re-storyation”3 is needed. In addition, Kimmerer writes, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the first plant to grow on Earth. “Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”4 This statement manifests an agency, a performativity of plants in the sense of a green archive: plants tell stories. This active power describes the relationship between humans and nature as reciprocal, as already alluded to in the previous quote, and questions a one-sided, human-centered relationship. The interaction between sweetgrass, soil and humans illustrates the complex structure of nature and the garden as an ecosystem en miniature5 and brings the performance to the fore as a place of encounter between plants and humans. Accordingly, the human being is decentered as the main actor in contemporary developments and the Earth presents itself as a living stage that is home to various entities, human and more-than-human. In my contribution, I would like to look at various gardens and their human and more-than-human actors in their respective contexts: (1) Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) by Hieronymus Bosch, (2) the garden as scene of worldmaking in Between the Waves (2012) by Tejal Shah, and (3) the role of gardens at the Venice Biennale Arte (2022 and 2024). The artistic positions share the simultaneity of (human and more-than-human) community and its (neocolonial) narratives of violence in the here and now. My contribution follows non-heteronormative forms of life and offers companionship in the sense of Donna Haraway’s approach to human-nature structures. This involves linking queer and post-humanist approaches that deconstruct the binary of human and the world and formulate a plea for more-than-human relationships. Particular attention will be paid to the significance of new ‘places of the communal’ in cultural practices, which redefine not only the concept of space but also that of (human and more-than-human) community. Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 My reflections are divided into four sections. Firstly, I would like to set out the theoretical foundations for my analyses. Here, I will elaborate on my concept of the garden, outline my reflections on performativity, and introduce the concept of queer ecologies following Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Bruce Erickson, and Christine Bauhardt.6 Secondly, starting very briefly from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), the garden will be discussed as a Foucauldian crisis heterotopia of the Anthropocene and presented as a starting point for developing the garden as a site for the performance of past and present crises. Thirdly, I place selected sequences of Tejal Shah’s multi-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012) at the center of my analyses in order to discuss more-than-human world-making in the context of queer ecologies. Fourthly, with the installation To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2022) by Precious Okoyomon, I pursue the question of the agency and performativity of plants, or rather, of a green archive. Conceptual Approaches: Gardens, Performance/Performativity, and Queer Ecologies In art history and visual culture studies, the garden has been closely associated with paradise since the Middle Ages, for example, the hortus conclusus. The term garden, as well as the German equivalent Garten, usually refer to a “cultivated, demarcated area, terrain”.7 Accordingly, the garden and what thrives in it is defined by its boundaries. In the 1990s, garden theorist Gilles Clément developed the concept of a planetary garden, thereby reversing the idea of boundaries: the garden is no longer defined by its fence, but rather by the planetary.8 Philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault also developed a different notion of the garden. In his 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces”, Foucault examines utopias and heterotopias. “Utopias are sites with no real place”,9 like the Garden of Eden or paradise. Foucault describes them as “society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces”.10 In comparison, Foucault develops the concept of heterotopias: places that can be described as factually realised utopias within our society. They are described as places “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality”.11 Foucault cites the garden as the oldest form of heterotopia, which thousands of years ago “had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings”.12 To illustrate this, Foucault draws on the traditional garden in present-day Iran, which was marked as a sacred space.13 Four parts of the world were anchored within this garden, in the middle of which the “navel of the world” was positioned – materialized by the basin and the water fountain.14 “[The] garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space […]. The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.”15 Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 From this, I would like to deduce that the garden still functions as an ecosystem en miniature, as a scene to reflect on the here and now and its crises in the Anthropocene.16 The garden is therefore, on the one hand, a space that can be located and is also outside of all places and times. On the other hand, the garden is a space in which ideas can overlap, revealing narratives of violence, pleasurable ways of life, species extinction, as well as inclusion and exclusion. In my following considerations and analyses, I would like to propose a working definition: the garden is not only a utopia but also represents an inbetween world. The garden as a heterotopia functions as a performance site for the past, present and future. I take performance to be a practice that deepens our understanding of temporality beyond the present, following Diana Taylor.17 Performance hereby means an aesthetic practice that is bound to an (embodied) archive, orienting it towards a temporality that we conceive as history. Accordingly, performance “participates in the transfer and continuity of knowledge”.18 In this case, plants become actors and the garden becomes the main performative element that constitutes an embodied archive against oblivion. Prudence Gibson and Catriona Sandilands state “that plants perform, and that they do so in several important ways”.19 In doing so, the garden as a heterotopia becomes a witness and an embodied archive of the landscape, reflecting the embedded history of violence. In my following analyses, I will argue, that plants are a living green archive and perform histories in several ways. Plants are anachronistic, causing us to experience the past in real time – and to imagine a future. To discuss this thesis, I will refer in my analyses to the artistic works mentioned at the beginning. These works seem suitable as an ecosystem en miniature, offering a lens to explore how the garden becomes active as an indicator of Anthropocene crises and functions as a stage for the conviviality of human and more-than-human actors. Before we ‘go’ into the gardens, I would like to outline the second, central concept of my text: queer ecologies. In order to summarise the first part theoretically, I would like to refer in particular to Donna Haraway and the queer theorist Antke Engel. Haraway writes: “Queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human / nonhuman sorting operation.”20 Furthermore, Engel describes queering as “a practice that uses language and images to disrupt the rule of normativity.”21 Queering is therefore a practice – a doing – with a concrete task. Following Engel and Haraway, in the context of this article, the focus is on questioning normativity, particularly binary gender and the binary of human–environment relationships. This leads me to queer ecologies, in which Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson place sexuality, nature, politics and desire as central theorems. They write that queer ecology has the task to develop “a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution and an environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences and constitutions of that world”.22 This Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 means that queer ecologies thwart hegemonic patterns of thought and expectation “that associate ‘ecology’ with an ontological naturalness of the binary of gender and heteronormative desire”.23 The artistic collective Institute of Queer Ecology also focuses on human and more-than-human actors, their relational networks of relationships and environmental concerns. The collective writes: “Queerness and ecology together make visible the interconnected, entangled conditions of life on earth and honour the strange, multispecies amalgamation we live in community with.”24 Haraway’s concept of companions, which is echoed in this quote, refers to the coexistence and interdependence of different species – and at the same time to their radical otherness.25 The question arises as to what extent the following world and garden designs as scenes of the Anthropocene intertwine two dimensions: (1) the garden as an indicator of crisis of the Anthropocene and (2) the garden as a performative assembly of more-than-human actors in the sense of “worlding-with”,26 which implies a radical otherness, relationality, and vulnerability.27 Or to put it another way: can the artistic works be read as a design that performatively shapes relations of crisis and the conviviality of human and more-than-human actors? Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights as an Indicator of Crisis Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) is my starting point for thinking about the performativity of the garden. The triptych fascinated his audience from the very beginning of its creation. The metaphorical abundance of this work has produced a broad, art-historical history of reception and a recurring fascination with the triptych.28 While a moralising and Christian reading of the work dominated the history of its reception for many decades, the art historian Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat undertook a feminist re-reading of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in 1985. In her analysis, she situates the Christian paradise, as imagined in the history of reception, within its historical context by formulating the thesis that Bosch’s world design criticises the social order of the time, especially witch hunts.29 Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 FIG. 1 Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights , 1490–1500, oil on canvas, 220 × 390 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. In current exhibition projects, the triptych is undergoing a revival. The immersive installation Bosch and Beyond, which has been on display at the Kühlhaus Berlin since autumn 2024, takes up the various levels in the history of Bosch’s reception. In the first part, the aspect of fascination and enigma is emphasised by advertising the ability to ‘finally’ physically immerse oneself in the triptych and understand the manifold pictorial worlds. On the other hand, The Garden of Earthly Delights becomes an indicator of crisis by showing international, contemporary artists in the last room of the exhibition who refer to climate change and environmental pollution.30 However, this transfer movement from Bosch and Beyond is not new: curator Stephanie Rosenthal chose Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights as the central reference for the exhibition Garden of Earthly Delights (Martin-GropiusBau, Berlin, 2019). Rosenthal states that “with an image like this, with paradise, with the garden, you can also talk about the state of our world.”31 The exhibition features 20 international artists. What all artistic positions have in common is that they use the garden as a conceptual metaphor to negotiate the crisisridden state of the world or climate change – and, in the sense of queer ecologies, to imagine a future. The artist Libby Harward questions colonial structures as told through plants. Zheng Bo, on the other hand, addresses a more-than-human intimacy between plants and humans. The artistic positions discuss the diversity of changing, vulnerable relationships between humans, plants, and animals, and in doing so also address the different forms of Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 violence that the garden can reveal, such as climate change or (neo)colonial violence. By repeatedly staging Bosch as a frame of reference, the triptych undergoes a renewed re-actualisation through this specific form of reenactment. On the one hand, the manifold reception of the work is reenacted, and the simultaneity of discourses is thereby performed. On the other hand, a new interpretation is developed through its transfer to the here and now: starting from and with Bosch, more-than-human intimacies and ecological exploitation can be discussed. In other words: Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights becomes a frame of reference and a scene for anthropocentric crises and discourses, presenting itself – following Foucault – as a heterotopic place par excellence.32 The Garden of Earthly Delights is thus no longer, as long proclaimed in art-historical research, a purely utopian place of paradise or a moral sermon, but – in Foucault’s sense – both a heterotopia of crisis, and, in the sense of queer ecologies, a place of pleasurable futures for more-thanhuman entities. Tejal Shah: Between the Waves (2012) Following on from the aforementioned pleasurable futures of more-thanhuman entities, I would like to cite the multi-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012) by contemporary Indian artist Tejal Shah and re-read it in the context of queer ecologies. Just as art historians have been fascinated by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights for decades, Shah’s world design has been with me for almost ten years. The video work presents itself with a similar abundance of fantastic visual worlds, which I have so far discussed in relation to the intersection of art historical, affect-theoretical and porn studies perspectives.33 However, Shah’s video work also offers a more than topical point of reference to current issues of the Anthropocene as a site for the performance of world-making.34 Following Clément and his definition of the garden as mentioned in the introduction, the world as a garden is central for the analyses of this video work. Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 FIG. 2 Tejal Shah, Between the Waves (2012), 5-channel video installation, video still from channel one. Between the Waves consists of a main film, “A Fable in Five Chapters”, which is accompanied by four further video works in the form of an installation, thus expanded to include additional narratives. The humanimals – half human, half animal – in white corsages with white horns on their heads wander through different world designs: they are at home in the (salt) desert, on the beach, in the mangrove forest, in the swimming pool, or on the balcony of an urban city. What these different settings have in common is that processes of industrialisation and environmental pollution are superimposed on fantastic natural scenarios. In these very different places, the humanimals seem to make connections with their environment and open up new living spaces. In the beach setting, they encounter algae and plastic waste. Together with the garbage, they bob around in the water, take each other by the hand, and go back into the waves. In the mangrove forest, the humanimals wander among the trees, stroking branches and tree trunks. They collect plastic waste from the branches and trees with sickles. In the swimming pool setting, they float in the pool; they hold onto their hips, let themselves drift away, or play with “natural-artificial”35 corals. These brief descriptions of the humanimals’ different world settings make it clear that they are never alone – plastic surrounds them in all world designs. Sandilands, who is so central to queer ecologies, and understands the garden as a site of multispecies world-making, suggests that world-making in the garden is not only about human desires.36 These scenes of world-making are very much connected with more-than-human actors like light, heat, cold, water, air, minerals,37 and, I want to add, plastic. Like Sandilands, Chris Bell also remarks, how “gardens reveal the inadequacy of human visions and endeavors,” which in turn has the ability to reveal “the worlds made possible through multi-species collaboration”.38 Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 This kind of world-making in the garden, is a worlding in which species respond and co-create conditions for life.39 Following Sandilands and Bell, the humanimals could be read as gardeners who embody processes of caring with their environment. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway, who has already been quoted several times in this text, writes: “We become-with each other or not at all.”40 This seems to be the motto of the humanimals as they merge with their environment – marked by processes of industrialisation – and enter into an active exchange with these different, plastic-infused worlds. The wandering, tumbling and playing of the humanimals seems to be a plea for becomingtogether and for an ecology of cross-species intimacy and ecological relatedness that enables more-than-human lives and worlds. The simultaneity of processes of industrialisation and environmental pollution, as well as the development of fantastic habitats, play an important role here. Haraway’s concept of natureculture,41 which questions the binarity of nature and culture and deconstructs the idea of an untouched nature, is central to this. In particular, the mangrove forest and the swimming pool setting show how narratives of artificiality and naturalness are intricately interwoven. In Plastic Matter (2022), the theorist Heather Davis refers to Shah’s Between the Waves and writes that plastic is not any material; rather, it is emblematic of life in the 20th and 21st centuries.42 Plastic permeates all relationships – human and more-than-human – and therefore, according to Davis, these ‘plastic’ relationships need to be reconsidered. In other words, the interconnectedness between plastic and the world around us is so advanced that a world without plastic no longer seems to exist. I would like to underline this thesis once again using a sequence from the swimming pool setting, in which the interweaving between the ‘artificial’ coral reef and the ‘natural’ coral reef unfolds. In this sequence, the humanimals swim underwater with a coral colony consisting of plastic and electrical waste. Red (plastic) jellyfish swim past them underwater. In between, there are film sequences of fish and coral reefs, as if from a nature documentary. My argument is that Shah’s work is not about pitting artificiality against naturalness and thus reproducing a binary of nature and culture. Rather, in the sense of queer ecologies and following Davis, it is about the fact that plastic is now nature, or, in short: the world is now made of plastic.43 Instead of replacing one concept of nature with another, the companions’ plea continues in the context of queer ecologies: “Make kin, not babies.”44 By making contact with their environment in their own way, I have shown how humanimals produce intimate ecologies. The humanimals function as caring gardeners who incorporate the violent traces of environmental pollution produced by human actors into their world design. In the sense of queer ecologies, this emphasises the interconnectedness, the learning together, the Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 nice-biennale-2024-garden (accessed: 27/04/2025). DWDS: “Garten.” In: Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 2021, URL: www.dwds.de/wb/Garten (accessed: 26/04/2025). Antke Engel/Jule Jakob Govrin/Eva von Redecker: Lust an Komplexität und Irritation. 10 Jahre Institut für Queer Theory . Berlin: Gender/Queer e.V., 2016. Michel Foucault/Jay Miskowiec: “Of Other Spaces.” In: Diacritics , vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. Prudence Gibson/Catriona Sandilands: “Introduction: Plant Performance.” In: Performance Philosophy , vol. 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–23. Ernst Hans Gombrich: “Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’: A Progress Report.” In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , no. 32, 1969, pp. 162–170. Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat: “Erotik und Inquisition Zum ‘Garten der Lüste’ von Hieronymus Bosch.” In: Renate Berger/Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat (eds.): Der Garten der Lüste: Zur Deutung des Erotischen und Sexuellen bei Künstlern und ihren Interpreten , Cologne: DuMont, 1985, pp. 10–47. Donna Haraway: The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness . Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press LLC, 2003. —: “Companion Species, Mis-Recognition, and Queer Worlding.” In: Noreen Giffney/Myra J. Hird (eds.): Queering the Non/Human . Farnham: Ashgate, 2008, pp. xxiii–xxvi. —: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Thari Jungen/Friederike Nastold: “Einleitung. Re-Lektüre des Gartens: Queere Ökologien, Kolonialismus, Gewalt.” In: FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur , no. 76, 2025a, pp. 6–21. —: “Re-Lektüren des Gartens. Eine ‘materiell-semiotische Kompostierung’ des Garten der Lüste (1490–1500).” In: FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur , no . 75, 2025b, pp. 129–141. Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Katrin Köppert/Alisa Kronberger/Friederike Nastold: “Editorial. dis/sense in der Anthropozänkritik.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries , no . 4, 2023, pp. 1–10. Nancy J. Loewenstein/Stephen F. Enloe/John W. Everest/James H. Miller/Donald M. Ball/Michael G. Patterson: “The History and Use of Kudzu in the Southeastern United States.” In: Alabama Cooperative Extension System , 2022, URL: https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/forestry-wildlife/the-history-and-use-of-kudzu-in-thesoutheastern-united-states/ (accessed: 26/04/2025). Isabell Lorey: Die Regierung der Prekären . Vienna/Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2012. Flavia Fossa Margutti: Biennale Arte 2024 Short Guide: Foreigners Everywhere . Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2024. Roger H. Marijnissen: Hieronymus Bosch . Thun: Weber, 1972. MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst): “PRECIOUS OKOYOMON. Earthseed.” In: Mmk.art , 2020, URL: https://www.mmk.art/en/whats-on/precious-okoyomon (accessed: 05/04/2025). Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands/Bruce Erickson (eds.): Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Friederike Nastold: “‘... undoing ‹normal› categories’ oder Queering Ecologies mit Seepferdchen, Korallen und humanimals in Tejal Shah’s Between the Waves (2012).” In: kritische berichte , vol. 52, no. 3, 2024, pp. 2–12. —: Zwischen I See You and Eye Sea You. Blick, Repräsentation, Affekt . Weimar: VDG, 2022. Stephanie Rosenthal: Garten der irdischen Freuden / Garden of Earthly Delights. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2019. Catriona Sandilands: “Worlds.” In: Laurie Cluitmans (ed.): On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation . Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021, pp. 179–182. Rebecca Schneider: “In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability: Rebecca Schneider in Conversation with Lucia Ruprecht.” In: Performance Philosophy , vol. 3, no. 1, 2017, pp. 108–125. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Alexis Shotwell: Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Diana Taylor: The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing/Nils Bubandt/Elaine Gan/Heather Ann Swanson: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Queerecology: “The Institute of Queer Ecology: Mutability and mutualism.” In: Queerecology.org , 2022, URL: www.queerecology.org/MUTABILITY-MUTUALISM-Seminar-with-the-Institute-for-Post natural (accessed: 26/04/2025). Silvia Wynter: “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In: Savacou , vol. 5, no. 1, 1971, pp. 95–102. Friederike Nastold The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies, and Green Archives INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 CREDITS Fig. 1: Wikimedia Commons. Fig. 2: Courtesy of the artist, Project 88, Mumbai and Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich. Fig. 3: Photo: Friederike Nastold. Fig. 4: Photo: Karoline Bauer. AUTHOR Friederike Nastold is trained as an artist and art historian. She is a junior professor of art history with a focus on Gender Studies at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg and deputy director of the Center for Gender Studies (ZFG) in Oldenburg. Her research focuses on Art and Visual Culture Studies, Gender/Queer Studies, Affect Theory, Queer Ecologies and the Garden. Publications: Friederike Nastold and Thari Jungen, “Re-Lektüren des Gartens: Eine ‘materiellsemiotische Kompostierung’ des Garten der Lüste (1490–1500)” in FKW 75 (2025); Friederike Nastold and Thari Jungen, “Umgraben, Kompostieren, Netz-Werken: Mehr-alsmenschliche Gefährt*innen gärtnern,” in Menschen-Pflanzen-Netzwerke: Vegetabile agency in der Klimakatastrophe , edited by Vanessa Sternath, Silvie Lang and Christine Riess (transcript, 2025). She also co-edited the 4th issue of INSERT , dis/sense in der Anthropozänkritik (2023).