Reflecting on Quarantined Ecologies
In Curtis Roth’s piece in PLAT 3.0, “Acid Ecologies, the Secret Life of Spanish Tomatoes,” Roth examined the effects of quarantine on an agricultural landscape in Almeria. In 10.5, he reviews this piece through our contemporary perspective on quarantine.
Almost a decade ago I wrote for PLAT about the strange, quarantined landscapes of intensive agriculture along the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Peculiar plots of land where technologies that promised perfect ecological control had somehow gone awry. Originally designed to ensure the optimal growing conditions for tomatoes and peppers, these highly engineered microclimates, comprised of greenhouses, fertilizers, and artificial soils also ensured the optimal growing conditions for transnational bacteria like E. coli. Once the risks of international produce recalls outweighed the potential rewards of fresh vegetables in the middle of winter, the infected plots were stripped, quarantined, and left to bake in the sun until production could begin again.
Ten years later, we would call this process flattening the curve. But looking back from what might be the tail end of our own two-year global quarantine, I’m struck by the fact that I spent much of my own time baking in the sun preoccupied with questions that now feel uncannily similar. Namely: how we might imagine a messier relationship to the technologies that organize life - one that isn’t premised on precision, speed and perfect predictability, but on unreliable assemblies of software, workers, data, and the unstable behaviors of matter. Whether that’s a bacteriological garden in Spain, or paint dripping from a hacked-together machine that is collaboratively controlled by online strangers scattered around the world.
