Installation by Vanessa Amoah Opoku

30 & 31 AUGUST 2025

Inside tropical greenhouses, the lush foliage often distracts from the hidden systems that make this artificial survival possible. In her new work Thresholds of Engineered Life, a series of prints in engraved steel frames, accompanied by a sound installation, Vanessa Amoah Opoku focusses on the pipes that sneak beneath the soil, the hissing misters and the blinking sensors — technical infrastructures that reveal the control sustaining species far from their original habitats. Many of these plants were transported during colonial expeditions and are now preserved under glass. The greenhouse becomes a metaphor for ongoing extraction, orchestrating survival and performing nature as spectacle.

To capture these spaces, Opoku uses tools that measure by collecting thousands of points across surfaces. Historically, such methods have claimed territory, extracted resources, and enforced dominance. Today, they remain part of surveillance and extractive digital economies.
Opoku uses them instead to expose mechanisms of control through Gaussian splatting, which turns each measured point into a soft, semi-transparent fragment. Each fragment becomes a refusal to participate in extractive seeing, breaking the illusion of objective capture. In the virtual world, preserved plants overgrow their infrastructure and turn the inside outwards.

Framed in engraved steel, these images come to life through poetic fragments describing a sonic transformation. The sound of this reality emerges from field recordings of mechanized greenhouse environments and sonification of the scanned data. As point clouds accumulate and plants virtually overgrow their containment, mechanical orchestrations transform: synthetic frequencies bloom from coordinate data, algorithmic rhythms dissolve into organic textures.