In-formal Models of Nature

“My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there's this pitch oozing out—some black, some yellow—and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” […] “I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.” – David Lynch¹

“Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known... As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up, or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling the noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, but of being itself.”  – Michel Serres²

What forms of nature—inconvenient or resistant—were erased, tamed or ignored in the creation of our landscaped utopia? What tangled histories, buried ecologies and ungovernable voices haunt the cracks of the (one-)nature imposed by design? How might we reimagine nature through hybrid, emergent and impure models that resist commodification, purity, and control? What alternative rituals, instincts and material encounters could reopen space for contingency, unpredictability and ecological plurality? How can human and more-than-human actors navigate spaces freed from premeditation and imposed order, allowing for unregulated growth and entangled belonging? ³ Taken together, these questions form not a map, but the setting of terrain in motion. Hothouse sets forth this framework for another nature to speak, asking what kinds of alternative growth might take root in the fractures of our designed environments, if space is left for other natures and PRIMAL INSTINCT to emerge.

PRIMAL INSTINCT opens another relation to pure intention through a transdisciplinary 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; it has become a fractured archive of possibility. We subvert the idea of (one-)nature ⁴ not with answers but with gestures that gradually replace it with a multiplicity of models grafted and woven into 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 places where tension accumulates, where the fiction of unity shows its fiction, where suppressed knowledge, alternative ecologies and hybrid ontologies surface. Cracks become not symbols of failure but sites of possibility. 

Points of rupture are foreign by default. They are not direct interruptions of the master’s discourse but inflections—points of diffraction. They are movable topologies, non-identities which are 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 what ultimately gets things in motion: latent drives, subversions kicking, the PRIMAL INSTINCT and informal strategies of reproduction, myths of redefinition, …possibly minor acts and marginal sites, indexes showing the possibility of radical inventions and activations, art speaking through primal screams, pointing to or gesturing towards a certain ontological rebellion. Cracks and folds are entry points, the topological complexity or point of rupture for unruly growth. They are metastatic fissures, allowing a polyphony of perspectives to take root and sprawl—for a subtle yet radical rewilding of thought. 

An invitation is extended to enter terrains where nature is no longer singular or polished, but multiple, unresolved and insistently alive. We begin from the recognition that the leaps of pure intention—so foundational to the nation-state’s Garden City vision—were not neutral gestures, but acts that narrowed the field of possibility, that set boundaries on what could be seen, felt, or allowed to grow. In this (one-)nature of the designed garden, other potential natures were stripped away: the unpredictable, the deformed, the uncanny, the sublime.

Against this backdrop, we searched for instincts—not as answers, but as cracks and countercurrents, in-formalities ⁵ through which alternative natures might surface. From this search came three instinctual responses, each proposing its own model of nature: Field Notes & the Ecology of Chance, TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE and Square Forest. Though divergent in form, they converge in their refusal of containment, offering ways to sense what lies beyond the monolithic coherence of a singular “nature.”

The field sits in suspension. Once the site of formal education—trimmed hedges, ordered timetables, the measured repetition of drills—it now waits, unsure whether the next gesture will be preservation or erasure. Raffles Girls’ School: the name carries the layered weight of colonial commemoration and the nation’s own elite histories, its playing fields long used to train discipline, stamina and collective display. Today, the grass is left to its own rhythm, neither fully wild nor entirely maintained—an in-between that resists certainty.

In this pause, three works have taken root. They are not posed as answers or puzzles to be solved. They remain open to shifting encounters—appearing, in different moments, as interruptions, echoes, or temporary definitions.

From across the expanse, a towering cube of green draws the eye—Square Forest by Salad Dressing—its trees rising well above head height, their canopy forming a dense, shaded volume. Approaching, the temperature drops, light fractures, and the atmosphere turns inward. The perimeter is visually dense and seemingly impenetrable, prompting hesitation and detour. One finds an entrance, and at the volume’s heart, a large, unmoving figure shaped from foliage—a lucky cat—anchors the space. Severe in outline yet porous to the elements, it sits as both guardian and witness. The forest’s stillness carries its own pressure, a sense of endurance that is as contemplative yet unyielding.

Nearby, Field Notes & the Ecology of Chance by Tini Aliman takes shape as a loose ring of stainless steel poles etched with random numbers and embedded in the earth, their surfaces catching the sun briefly before sliding back into shadow. Rising at their centre is a mast fitted with four horn speakers, each facing a cardinal direction. At intervals, bird calls break the air—familiar yet never quite belonging to this moment. The sound slips from different directions, displacing the present with echoes of other hours, other landscapes, other histories—temporalities and identities.

Further along the grass, skeletal metal frames mark the ground—TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee. The components, once the most ordinary of canteen tables, have been unscrewed, disassembled and reconfigured into lean, repetitive structures. Their linear discipline is softened by small irregularities: tilts, bunches, the occasional leaning away. The table frames recall their former service without nostalgia, their current form slipping between architecture and choreography, workaday object and improbable ornament. 

For some, this may suggest how the neatness of planned landscapes often mutes the vivid saturation of what is patchy or leftover. (One-)nature makes it difficult to encounter these residues—objects, sounds or fragments that do not fit the design—yet it is precisely in such encounters that the possibility of instinctive gestures arises. What altars could be assembled from mud, from chance fragments, from stray acoustics?

An audience might come to sense how (one-)nature, with its norms and standards, restricts such possibilities, standardising value and forbidding serendipity. In this light, the cancelled encounter, the wasted time, even the instinctive impulse to repurpose or misuse, become part of what is repressed. Perhaps then, what emerges is not a fixed conclusion but an open question: what does it mean for spontaneity, for contingency itself, to be disallowed by (one-)nature?

“Nature” is at once all and nothing, a prism of complexity, a constellation of concealed models awaiting exploration and collective redefinition. It is a cipher—generic and open at its base, yet always inscribed with multiplicities within its folds. What matters is not the recovery of a singular truth, but the emergence of alternative modes of speaking and making nature, to see what blossoms through hybrid interpretations and representations, by attending to the marginal characters left aside when one model (of nature) is privileged over the very many left aside.

We are interested in the collective dimension of definition, in the acts of translation, invention, and negotiation that bring new social and environmental ecologies into being. Nature—entropy, necessity, feral drives—and the human—story, abstraction, feral drives—stand here as co-constitutive forces, entwined in a dance between unpredictability and structure. To be human is not only to chase rational progress but to honour the unknown, to stay with what is fragile, futile, or unresolved, and to discover meaning within unlikely motions. In this light, the works become both elegy and invocation—a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of certainty.

The site is marginal, an informal infrastructure, strangely liminal—neither abandoned nor fully tended. The former Raffles Girls’ School field remains after the school has moved, a patch of ground now loosened from the regimentation of drills and chalked lines. The grass is uneven, untrimmed, brimming with weeds and untamed growth. Trees edge its perimeter, and the surface carries faint echoes of its past: the memory of games, the discipline of routine, the performance of order. Without daily care, it has softened, rewilded in parts, and begun to drift towards entropy.

In it, with it, on it, we envision a mediated occupation of a field unshackled from precision—a ground open to the chance of becoming. This is not mere abandonment but a deliberate inquiry into the tension between control and autonomy. What might flourish when systems of dominance are surrendered? How do human and more-than-human actors navigate uncharted ecologies, where time and change carve their paths unchecked?

The gesture—of letting go of control, of reframing, rewilding, shifting, parasitising ⁶—becomes both conceptual and visceral: an ode to ecological autonomy, primal impulse, and the infinite possibilities of contingency—the unregulated. It asks us to reconsider the entangled relationships between species, spaces and the forces that bind and unbind them. What was built persists, but it does not care.