Ecotropical Plasticity in the Fictional Botany of Miguel Pipa

A:
«There is no boundary that can separate us. We are infinitely connected and part of a whole of unreachable size.»

[Miguel Pipa, 2021]

B:
Miguel Pipa was born in 1980 in Caxinas, the peculiar fishermen’s neighborhood of Vila do Conde. Without an academic education by choice, he has always shown a permanent concern with the outside world that surrounds him and a constant curiosity for what is behind things.
For him, nothing is acquired. Everything that comes to hand is questioned, dismantled and reprocessed.That’s how he started experimenting in the field of electronic music, investigating new sonic possibilities that classical instruments could offer when manipulated in an alternative way, or creating new instruments himself from the most common objects of everyday life.
Over the last decade, following the principles of ecotropism, he has been creating, through drawing, a world of interconnected mutant microorganisms that he calls fictional botany.
He presents his work to the public for the first time, in September 2021, at the Cruzes Canhoto gallery (Porto), in the exhibition “Microecotropias”.

C:
Ecotropism is derived from Eco+Tropism, meaning to turn towards the Earth. The term ‘ecotropics’ appeared for the first time in literature, in the writing of the poet John Campion, in “Toward an Ecotropic Poetry” (1974), but it was quickly spread by several areas of science, especially those of an environmental nature, that insisted on building a new human cultural relation with the Earth. The basic philosophy of ecotropism and ecotropics argues that to be healthy human culture itself must inhabit an ecological niche, and thereby, relate appropriately with all the co-evolving forces, organic and inorganic. In short, human culture must turn towards the environment for a sustainable and meaningful future.

D:
«Plants embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world. The opposite is equally true: the plant is the purest observer when it comes to contemplating the world in its totality. Under the sun or under the clouds, mixing with water and wind, their life is an endless cosmic contemplation, one that does not distinguish between objects and substances—or, to put differently, one that accepts all their nuances to the point of melting with the world, to the point of coinciding with its very substance. We will never be able to understand a plant unless we have understood what the world is.»

[Emanuele Coccia, in The Life of Plants – A Metaphysics of Mixture, 2018]