Thinking through the vegetal condition requires, above all, shifting away from the paradigm of cold science (hard science) and its taxonomic drive. Only then can we open ourselves to an intuitive and relational threshold: understanding the garden as a postnatural and hybrid territory in which the vegetal, the technological, and the symbolic intertwine in unstable ways.

It is at this intersection of temporalities that A Long Chemical Dream, a project by Gabriel Alonso, takes shape, questioning the ways in which Western botany constructed its knowledge. The pro-ject challenges an epistemology that reduced plants to the condition of immobile, inactive beings devoid of anima. Since the eighteenth century, when botany was instrumentalised in the pursuit of “green gold,” plant science has been shaped by political and economic interests. The collecting

bags of the colonial era were not merely tools: they were containers for the forced displacement of vegetal bodies, uprooted from their…