Unpaving paradise: Shonee brings biophilia to the big city
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“I lived basically inside of a jungle.”
Speaking over the phone from her home in Montreal, Shonee recalls her youth with a sort of mournful fondness. Also known as Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes, the digital media artist grew up in Costa Rica, taking intense biodiversity for granted from an early age and growing up amongst lush rainforests densely populated by amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals until her family uprooted and moved to Bowmanville, Ontario when she was nine.
“I had this kind of massive culture shock,” she tells Long Winter. “I came here basically in the dead of winter to the greyest, smallest little suburban town.”
Even when she moved beyond the confines of the suburbs to Montreal, the carefully manicured slices of greenery of the Global North left an equally indelible impression on her.
“One of the things I noticed when I got [to Canada] was that plants were just kept in these small little — it’s like in the sidewalks we kind of make a little dirt patch where trees can grow, but it’s not even like that in [Costa Rica’s capital] San José necessarily. It’s just like the idea of nature being static, impersonal things on TV here.”
Developing her practice in response to that dissonance, Shonee’s art is full of mutations and radical growth, captured through a vaporwave looking-glass. It’s high on the remembered wonderment of a childhood spent immersed in natural abundance, but Shonee’s reimagined those scenes and the creatures populating them existing in tandem with the accelerated technologies of the urban experience she’s embedded in today, to the point where her creations often evoke the alien futures of science fiction — part Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, part Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
“I guess it’s really speculative, but I question what if plants and animals or natural things were to evolve with technology, too?”
Scene from Shonee’s ‘Last Species on earth’ (2022).
In Last Species on Earth, a transhumanist 2022 multi-channel video installation Shonee created for the Ecologies & Cosmologies residency at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, a swollen pregnant belly is the incubation chamber for the last surviving specimens of plant and animal origins, their sequencing flashing an advertisement on its side like a coming attraction. On the one hand, it’s swimming in biophilia — the innate instinct to connect with nature — but it also highlights the tenuous hold that instinct has on us.
“We psychologically benefit from feeling one with nature; nature inherently is inside of us. As a species I feel like we just take and take and that’s our relationship with plants and animals, but if we still wanted that but then didn’t want to deal with sharing space or anything, we could just manufacture them digitally, and just take what we needed from the emotional response.”
Chuckling at her own suggestion, Shonee acknowledges her work does just that — recreating nature as a fetish scene for a digital space when the natural world exists just beyond their mediating devices — but in highlighting it with the exaggerated glow of simulated bioluminescence, her art might provoke them to reexamine their relationships with the natural world.
“I think these worlds are purely created from human desire. I think of them as nature playhouses, where these things purely exist to satiate the human need for desire,” she says. “We see everything as like a shopping mall that we can just go to and be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll have this, I’ll have this…’ So in this world you as a human can pick everything and everything is in your favour, and nature is completely governed by that, and it’s okay with being domesticated. Which I think is strange.”
Divorcing desire from the compulsions of consumption and colonialism and attaching it instead to a vocabulary of play and immersion, her art highlights our mutual connection with nature, reclaiming space for wildlife in the viewer’s consciousness as much as the physical world while encoding a place for it in their shared futures.
Before the pandemic, that connective instinct led Shonee on mushroom foraging visits to forests in Quebec.
Relating the conclusions of mycologist Paul Stamets, she notes that “mycelial networks mimic the internet sort of the way the internet is laid out like these maps.”
Unable to tune into those networks in the height of Montreal’s pandemic lockdowns, Shonee set about simulating the techno-connective potential of plantlife in an augmented reality (AR) project that allowed users to project “living” virtual sculptures of her plant creations across their living spaces via their smartphone screens, similar to the effect of scanning a room with an Instagram filter.
“I wanted people to be able to escape into nature, but on their phones,” she reflects. Premiering during a virtual edition of Mutek Forum in 2021, it allowed audiences from around the world to bring the outside world in, erasing the barriers of the all-too-familiar walls that surrounded them. “AR’s an interesting avenue just simply because you can be in a place that you wake up in every single day, and then you can use AR and that place is transformed.”
With legal pandemic restrictions lifted, as a part of Long Winter’s Hypercity residency, Shonee is taking those ideas and their ironies a step further, this time applying them to the urban phenomenon of city gardens.
Premiering at Hypercity in November (launch details coming soon), Shonee has a new AR project in store that simulates a city garden, swapping out the domesticated plant species one would expect for weeds and overgrowth.
“We’ve convinced ourselves a city garden is a great thing. And it is a great thing. Pollinators can go there, it’s a little cut out place in a city where nature can still exist,” Shonee explains. “But if you kind of dissect it, [a city garden is] a little slice in a city where we’ve allowed domesticated species to exist.‘I’ll grow my tomatoes here but the tomato plants have to yield tomatoes, and this herb has to be here, and if weeds introduce themselves here, I’ll cut them out.’”
Conveying that puritanical utilitarianism in terms of colonialism, she says the work will also feature pollinators, and although it is still under development, at the time of this interview, she says it will be site specific, corresponding to a parking lot in downtown Toronto — in a sense, unpaving a parking lot to reinstate paradise.
“I’m imagining what existed underneath our houses or underneath the sidewalks in cities. Erecting these little plants and animal scapes, it’s kind of as if we have the power to just undo the present.”
Shonee’s City Garden is a part of Long Winter’s Hypercity programming, running November 2022 through March 2023.