“Assisted Shedding”, 2025
We live with a constant urge to control, to shape, to rescue.
What could unfold on its own, we take over and make legible. Bark is stripped; trees are arranged; living matter is turned into a stage for our gaze. It reads as care, yet functions as control.
Through Latour’s lens, “nature” appears manufactured—produced by social, technological, and economic systems. The same script governs public life today: governments promise safety while narrowing freedom; institutions regulate in the name of care; regimes sort society under the banner of order.
The mark on the bark is the mark of administration—an act that fixes and reduces.
This work names the pattern plainly: what passes for protection operates as control.
Life is staged until unpredictability is gone.
