Ramón del Castillo, Professor at UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain)

This event will be focused on Jardín de los delirios (2019) which title evokes El Bosco’s Garden of Delights, substituting delirium for delight, and whose subtitle  (las ilusiones del naturalism) also deliberately plays with the ambiguity of the Spanish word “ilusión” which means both "illusion" and "delusion." The objective of my book was to dismantle some preconceptions about naturalistic landscape architecture that has become fashionable in recent years, but I also analyzed ideas as rewilding and re-naturalization y and its connections with different conceptions of ecology. I will also explain why I adhered to the ideas of some geographers and philosophers who polemically claimed that “Nature does not exist” such as Slavoj Žižek or Erik Swyngedouw, who argues: “There is no such thing as a singular Nature around which an environmentally and socially just politics can be constructed and performed. Rather, there are a multitude of natures and a multitude of existing, possible or practical socio-natural relations” […]  “The focus on a singular Nature that requires ‘sustaining’ or, at least, ‘managing’, is sustained by a particular ‘quilting’ of Nature that forecloses asking political questions about immediately and really possible alternative socio-natural arrangements.”