Séminaire de recherche THP - Plantationocene, Infrastructure, and Creative Resistance in the Garden Plot
25 Sep 2025
Dans le cadre du séminaire de recherche du département THP (Théorie, Histoire, Projet)
Jeudi 25 septembre 2025
16h
École d’architecture Paris-Malaquais
1 rue Jacques Callot (3e étage) – Paris VIe
Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles
Cette année, le séminaire de Master du département Théorie Histoire Projet (THP) a pour thème : « Infrastructures, objets, discours, imaginaires ». Dans ce cadre, plusieurs conférencières et conférenciers sont invités à partager leurs travaux au croisement de l’histoire de l’architecture, des techniques, de l’environnement, des études décoloniales et de genre.
Plantationocene, Infrastructure, and Creative Resistance in the Garden Plot
Professor Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne
This presentation addresses the site-specific impacts of the Plantationocene in the Republic of Seychelles, a granitic and coralline archipelago in the Indian Ocean, geopolitically associated with East Africa. The Plantationocene (Haraway 2015, Chao 2022) describes the planetary scale of what has also been called the “plantation regime” and the “plantation complex” (Mbembe 2019), its global supply chains and networks, material flows of resources, and its historical reliance on enslaved labour in agricultural land management. The infrastructural logics of the Plantationocene depend on what Jane Hutton calls “reciprocal landscapes” (2019) whereby extraction of resources in a vulnerable environment supports development in wealthy metropoles. This is what Val Plumwood has described as the production of “shadow places” (2008); environments sacrificed for the material benefit of imperial power and privilege. The capitalist-colonial continuum founds itself on a plantation complex that is planetary in scope, including violent histories of displaced peoples and enslaved labour, and contemporary histories that draw on the spatial and material logics of the plantation to organise urban development to this day. First colonised by the French, through the annexation of the islands, the laying of a stone of possession, and the landing of the first colonisers (1756-1770), then ceded to the British (1810-1814), the Seychelles was originally developed with enslaved labour. I draw on environmental stories gleaned from my family archive, from former members of the Seychellois French plantocracy, and from the oral histories of locals as well as members of the Seychellois creole diaspora. I develop feminist auto-theoretical approaches to unfold what Sylvia Wynter has analysed as the distinction between the plantation and the provision plot where gossip and grigri (a local form of magic that can be associated with the pharmaceutical benefits of the garden) support the emergence of a creole identity. Where the plantation is dedicated to the extraction of resources for profit, the provision plot, or the Seychellois creole garden, emerges as the means of reclaiming cultural knowledge practices in the biorefugia of the garden.
Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden (2012-2019). Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies (2018), and Dirty Theory (2019). She has co-edited several volumes such as Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems (2022); Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (2021); Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (2020); and a special issue of the Journal of Architecture, Jennifer Bloomer: A Revisitation (2023). Most recently, she co-edited a special issue of the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal, celebrating 100 years since Gilles Deleuze’s birth, entitled A Deleuzian Life – A People to Come (2025).
Jeudi 25 septembre 2025
16h
École d’architecture Paris-Malaquais
1 rue Jacques Callot (3e étage) – Paris VIe
Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles
Cette année, le séminaire de Master du département Théorie Histoire Projet (THP) a pour thème : « Infrastructures, objets, discours, imaginaires ». Dans ce cadre, plusieurs conférencières et conférenciers sont invités à partager leurs travaux au croisement de l’histoire de l’architecture, des techniques, de l’environnement, des études décoloniales et de genre.
Plantationocene, Infrastructure, and Creative Resistance in the Garden Plot
Professor Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne
This presentation addresses the site-specific impacts of the Plantationocene in the Republic of Seychelles, a granitic and coralline archipelago in the Indian Ocean, geopolitically associated with East Africa. The Plantationocene (Haraway 2015, Chao 2022) describes the planetary scale of what has also been called the “plantation regime” and the “plantation complex” (Mbembe 2019), its global supply chains and networks, material flows of resources, and its historical reliance on enslaved labour in agricultural land management. The infrastructural logics of the Plantationocene depend on what Jane Hutton calls “reciprocal landscapes” (2019) whereby extraction of resources in a vulnerable environment supports development in wealthy metropoles. This is what Val Plumwood has described as the production of “shadow places” (2008); environments sacrificed for the material benefit of imperial power and privilege. The capitalist-colonial continuum founds itself on a plantation complex that is planetary in scope, including violent histories of displaced peoples and enslaved labour, and contemporary histories that draw on the spatial and material logics of the plantation to organise urban development to this day. First colonised by the French, through the annexation of the islands, the laying of a stone of possession, and the landing of the first colonisers (1756-1770), then ceded to the British (1810-1814), the Seychelles was originally developed with enslaved labour. I draw on environmental stories gleaned from my family archive, from former members of the Seychellois French plantocracy, and from the oral histories of locals as well as members of the Seychellois creole diaspora. I develop feminist auto-theoretical approaches to unfold what Sylvia Wynter has analysed as the distinction between the plantation and the provision plot where gossip and grigri (a local form of magic that can be associated with the pharmaceutical benefits of the garden) support the emergence of a creole identity. Where the plantation is dedicated to the extraction of resources for profit, the provision plot, or the Seychellois creole garden, emerges as the means of reclaiming cultural knowledge practices in the biorefugia of the garden.
Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden (2012-2019). Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies (2018), and Dirty Theory (2019). She has co-edited several volumes such as Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems (2022); Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (2021); Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (2020); and a special issue of the Journal of Architecture, Jennifer Bloomer: A Revisitation (2023). Most recently, she co-edited a special issue of the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal, celebrating 100 years since Gilles Deleuze’s birth, entitled A Deleuzian Life – A People to Come (2025).
