Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed

Pedro Neves Marques (b. 1986, Lisbon, Portugal) is an artist and writer whose films explore ecology, the earth’s natural resources, and the politics and practices that govern humans’ interactions with them. Neves Marques creates films that teeter between documentary and science fiction and that blur the lines between what in our world feels eerily futuristic and what is simply a continuing echo of the past. Throughout, he delves into topics including genetically modified organisms (GMO), oil rigs and gas pipelines, market growth models and industrial agriculture, and gender issues and the history of colonialism to better understand the ways in which these systems interact and place certain worldviews above others.

For the High Line, Neves Marques presents Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed (2017), The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant (2016), and YWY, The Android (2017). Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed follows an astronaut’s monologue about eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus’s sexual taxonomical system of plants. YWY, The Android invites the viewer into a dialogue between an indigenous android and a transgenic cornfield in the heavily transformed interior of Brazil. The short The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant shows a ritual dance between a robot and a sensitive plant and serves as an interlude between the two films.

Organized by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.