Halina Łapińska
Arts & Cultural Studies Review, Issue 4 (42), 2019, pp. 492 - 508
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.19.025.11921Sensory Garden as a Place of Affective Coexistence of Human and Non-Human Subjects in a City
The article analyzes the idea of a sensory garden as a place of symbiotic affective coexistence of human and non-human subjects in urban space, based on the concept presented in the study of green areas belonging to the “Zachęta” Housing Cooperative in Białystok prepared in 2018 by a team from the Białystok University of Technology. The article tries to answer the question of how the sensory garden becomes a space inviting to build affective connections between the entities that co-create it, and whether this reveals its potential leading to the blurring the boundaries between oppositional categories of “nature” – “culture”, “subject” – “object”. The authors note that the concepts of critical posthumanism appreciating the affective relationships between human and non- human actors, as well as non-humans going beyond the functional framework created by human, resonate in the idea of the sensory garden presented in the study. The sensory garden becomes a productivity sphere appreciating the value of the multi-sensory experience of the world, in which humans and non-humans find countless, often non-obvious ways of interacting with each other.
* Badania – sfinansowane z subwencji przekazanej przez Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego – zostały zrealizowane na Politechnice Białostockiej w ramach pracy badawczej nr S/WA/1/17. Dotyczy Haliny Łapińskiej.