In the mid-nineteenth century, Ascension Island became the site of a British imperial experiment in environmental transformation. Through global networks of plant exchange and scientific collaboration—including Charles Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker—the island was reshaped into a constructed ecosystem, formed not through co-evolution but deliberate design.
Johanna Binder’s project, including Becoming Islanders, uses this history to examine how ecological interventions are legitimized through expertise and institutional power. She contrasts this with a speculative ecology based on coexistence and ecological fitting, where unrelated species form open-ended communities.
The video Ascension: Blossoms of Power serves as the exhibition’s core, combining digital mapping, archival material, and speculation to present the island as both real and constructed. Its final shift to a plant perspective challenges human-centered narratives.
This approach continues in Talking Land, a hybrid ceramic sculpture paired with a rhizomatic floor drawing and a soundscape derived from plant recordings. Together, they evoke a decentralized, responsive ecosystem.
The exhibition portrays a living system gradually moving beyond human control, reframing ecology as a process of interaction rather than domination.