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R.M. Villa:
"Imaginal Gardening. On the Life of Suspended Images";
Talk: Architecture and Naturing Affairs, ETH Zürich; 2020-01-24 - 2020-01-25.

Whereas today commerce and finance occupy a forefront position and often direct politics on a global as much as on a local scale, this has not been al­ ways the case. In antiquity, the figure of the merchant was rather expelled from the city. Both Plato and Aristotle, for instance, condemned financial speculation, for at least two reasons: first, its potentially endless process would threaten the fulfilment of the needs of the city and, instead of con­ taining them, it would open them up to a dangerous indeterminacy. Fur­ thermore, speculation itself was con­ sidered an "unnatural" kind of pro­ duction, since interests (its `products´) would not represent any necessity nor truth. Such condemnation consti­ tutes the bases for the clash between technical products and natural givens that runs as a thread throughout the whole history of Western thought un­ til the present day. But what if we think of speculation and of its products in architectonic terms? Can we perhaps conceive of interests in analogy to architectural projects-as images with an own autonomy, that are not merely mimetic nor functional but are nev­ ertheless real, in which nature and
technics are not seen as opposed but rather put in communication with each other? Under this light, both the architectural project and the financial interest can be looked at as special kind of `beings´ that are not yet spe­ cific, but also not generic. Instead of merely technical products, we can conceive of them as imaginary capi­ tals: figures in which any function, di­ rection or destination is not abrogat­ ed but `suspended´ (Aufgehoben). Like in a garden, such `species´ would find themselves in­between nature and ar­ tifice; in a suspended condition that withholds itself from the imposition of any function or truth, but that at the same time does not get lost into indeterminacy. Through such "imag­ inal" gardening, reality is here nor naturalistically depicted nor ficti­ tiously mystified, but rather articu­ lated in its material `breath´.

speculation, postmodern, currency, digitalisation, plato, aristotle

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_287875.pdf