Vivarium

Exuberant Ecology, Places of Life

“I know the world / only through / form,” says the poet about the miniature. In this avowal, the world exists in form, and the form carries in it the world. More so, an ecology that comprises it. In Vivarium of Agencies, Isola Tong considers the poetic potential of the vivaria, etymologically places of life, in looking at the necessary wildness of queer relationality and agency. As its own miniature, the vivarium is in itself a world, an enclosed ecosystem scaled down to a glass box, a bowl, or a bottle. It is simultaneously self-sustaining and self-referential as much as it samples or simulates an elsewhere and alludes to a vaster world. How does one speak of life, ecology, the world without forsaking neither its form nor its vitality, its exuberance?

As part of a larger research project on the Arroceros Forest Park, a pocket of forest at the center of urban Manila cared for and preserved by the women of Winner Foundation, this iteration of the project looks at the interweaving of rigidities in the structure of urban life and the prolific flourish of flora and fauna. She looks at the park as “queer space, an urban forest of translocations or a dynamic spatiality in perpetual transformation which acts as a space of trans and femme representation and resistance.” The exhibition pursues Isola’s interest in animating environments—in her practice, dimensions—where heteronormative assumptions are breached by transitivities of both forms and forms of life. She nominates these as transdimensions, where both human and non-human wills and agencies ramify, where stabilities of identity are endangered by vital materialities, proliferation of organism. For the artist, this dimension presents “a chimeric locationality outside the heteronormative time-space constructs, rife with anachronisms, multiplicities, moments, and becomings.” In this iteration, both park and vivarium are motivated as transdimensions.

By thinking about the vivarium not just as a trope for a smaller and more manageable ecosystem but also as a dimension that becomes both a site for cultivating an ecology of agencies and as staging of scenes of wildlife thriving, the exhibition vivifies intimacies of atmosphere, environment, and agent, elaborating their intricate implications. In inaugurating the vivarium as an exceptional trope that elaborates the project’s logic of practice, the materiality of glass becomes pertinent as it ensures that the environment within it is controlled but is nonetheless affected by variables from its outside, such as light. Thus, the binary between interior and exterior disintegrates. In nominating the exhibition as a vivarium of agencies, we imagine its space to transform into an experiment in mediating and troubling the matrix of nature/culture, “hacking into, trailing, rooting, feeding, growing like fungi and epiphytic flora in the cracks and crevices of the existing grid of the contemporary nation-state and global capitalism.” In this scenario, queerness elucidates possibility: wayward growth, excitable life, exuberant ecology. - Carlos Quijon