For the final session of the seminar series Infrastructures, Ecologies and Territories, organized by the Spiral Research Centre and the Unit of Research in Architecture (URA), we will discuss the logics of plantation and their limits. The event will take place on Wednesday, May 20th, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Liège, Room E1 Charlotte Perriand, Boulevard de la Constitution 41, 4020 Liège.

History has shown that plantation systems structured production areas according to the model of monoculture, and power relations according to the model of forced labor and slavery. Devastating the environments where they operate, plantations embody the theory of “creative destruction,” according to which capital’s interests use the ruins of one plantation enterprise to reinvent what will ensure the success of the next. Thus, from colonial estates to automated greenhouses, via extractive infrastructures and global supply chains, plantations organize and alter ecologies, bodies, ways of forming community, as well as ways of perceiving and inhabiting worlds. The aim of this workshop is to disrupt what plantations signify. The lines that structure a landscape can sometimes become vanishing lines. Environments are never merely passive backdrops. The people and entities that inhabit them respond to the plantation-like situations imposed upon them. Thus, beneath these regimes of production optimization and yield intensification, frictions, improvisations, and terrestrial entanglements persist that elude mastery and control.

This workshop invites students, researchers, and colleagues interested in architecture, Science and Technology Studies (STS), political ecology, and interdisciplinary research to explore plantations not only as systems of domination, but also as historically contingent and varied formations. Ways of doing, thwarting, transgressing, or blurring their contours are constantly being invented there. We will begin with diverse situations, such as tea plantations in the Assam region of India; greenhouse infrastructures in intensive agriculture and their pollination strategies; or the geometric conception of Cartesian space. Taken as a whole—inevitably disparate—these intersecting perspectives will reveal different genealogical lines, colonial and non-colonial, human and non-human. We will ask, in particular, how seemingly totalizing systems remain fragmented, scattered, and contested. We hope these reflections will invite us to sow discord within the plantation landscapes we have inherited and, in doing so, enable us to better challenge them. 

We are pleased to welcome the following speakers for this exceptional event: 
- Professor Maan Barua (University of Cambridge, ERC Urban Ecologies research program); 
- Professor Rebeca Ibáñez-Martín (University of Amsterdam, ERC VITALGREENHOUSE research program); 
- Professor Clemens Driessen (Wageningen University, who has notably worked with Rem Koolhaas on the research he will present to us).

A reading list is recommended, though not required, to best inform the discussions and moments of reflection planned, which will undoubtedly be of high quality: https://dox.uliege.be/index.php/s/cf0AGc2NxhfP34b. 

Planting the scene