The gardens

In the painting The Garden of Bionic Birds, a constellation of small winged beings inhabits a liquid landscape. Their forms are half natural, half artificial, composed of feathers and metal, vivid colors and synthetic geometries. It is a “post-natural” garden, populated by creatures that have been reconstructed, repaired and enhanced by technology, but are still fragile in their ambiguous vitality.

In this sense, The Garden of Bionic Birds is a visual metaphor for Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Birds become the new cyborgs of the animal world: beings that challenge the boundaries between nature and artifice, between what is “alive” and what is “constructed”. Haraway reminds us that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world”, and we might add, in this case, a post-species world. Every bird in this garden inhabits a hybrid identity, where the organic and the mechanical merge without hierarchies or nostalgia for purity.

The absence of men in the painting is not a shortcoming, but rather a statement, a gesture that is both political and poetic: it represents the need to decentralize humans from the narrative of life. As Haraway suggests, we must abandon the dualisms that have structured Western culture (nature/culture, human/animal, male/female) to embrace a more complex, interconnected, “impure” way of thinking. In this garden, the boundary does not separate, but unites: it is the place where life reinvents itself. And technology is no longer at the service of human domination, but an integral part of an ecosystem of bodies and machines in dialogue.

Bionic birds, therefore, are not only symbols of a technological future, but figures of responsibility. They remind us that every intervention in life, from cloning to genetic reconstruction, involves a form of co-creation, a complicity that forces us to rethink ethics and power. As in Frankenstein’s monster’s warning, the question resounds here too: who decides who has the right to exist?

In the suspended silence of their flight, these birds invite us to look at the world in a new way: no longer as architects of biodiversity, but as cohabitants of a shared garden, where life, in all its versions, natural and artificial, continues to invent forms of beauty, relationship and survival.

Text by Stefania Migliorati and Leona Stay