Hothouse’s PRIMAL INSTINCT confronts the theme of pure intention through a trans-disciplinary lens — an approach not born of method, but of necessity, shaped by the velocity and violence of the now. This is not an exercise in critique, but in compression — where understanding moves beyond the analytical and becomes a reckoning: emotional, pressurised, and yet strangely clarifying. The photosynthescript that is ‘Nature’ is no longer a neutral backdrop, but a fractured archive of possibility. We subvert the idea of (one-)nature not with answers, but with gestures to gradually replace it with a multiplicity of models grafted and woven in its cracks. This is not an appeal to idealism, but a recognition of what already is: tangled, emergent, and forever forking paths. These cracks are not simply structural flaws, but generative spaces: signs of strain in the imposed coherence of a singular worldview. They are the places where tension accumulates, where the fiction of unity shows it can split, where suppressed knowledges, alternative ecologies, and hybrid ontologies find room to surface. Cracks become not a symbol of failure, but a site of possibility, as they speak other languages, they are not direct interruptions of the master’s discourse, they are points of diffraction, sort of movable topologies difficult to represent. We are interested in finding those moments of intensification, to have a peek at what hides beyond, running parallel to, subjected to, yet countering, the bluntness of a pure intention. We are lured towards that that ultimately gets things in motion: the latent drives, the sub-versions kicking, the PRIMAL INSTINCT and informal strategies of re-production, myths of re-definition, possibly minor acts/sites, indexes showing the possibility of radical inventions and activations, art speaking through primal screams, pointing to or gesturing towards a certain ontological rebelling. Cracks and folds are to be discovered for marking the entry points, or the curvatures for unruly growth. They are meta-static fissures, allowing a polyphony of perspectives to take root and sprawl — for a subtle yet radical rewilding of thought.

PRIMAL INSTINCT, our curatorial framework, is thus a manifesto to analyse and question the monolithic, orderly and tamed definition of “nature” (the model of nature) embraced through leaps of “pure intention” — the moves foundational to the nation-state's vision of becoming a planetary reference point: a Garden City. The (one-)nature of the designed garden brutally strips (other-)nature(s) of its potential openness, of the virtual possibility of true unpredictability, and of course, of the sublime and uncanny beauty of the inform, the deformed, the transformed. We looked and searched for instincts, to select ultimately a few, to subvert and reimagine this (one-)nature, to activate (an-other-)natures, promoting definitions that defy ideological containment. Three instinctual responses were therefore selected to be part of our curatorial framework, three very different yet possibly converging models of nature: Field Notes & the Ecology of Chance [Tini Aliman], TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE [Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee] and Square Forest [Salad Dressing].