In the cultivated habitats, the diverse networked relations between animals, plants and humans are considered. Habitat derives from the Latin verb habitare and means, ‘he/she/it inhabits’. The very first habitat of humans was probably not a cultivated environment, but a natural one. In search of shelter, man took possession of parts of nature – and cultivated them. Culture is also derived from Latin. Cultura means ‘to cultivate’, ‘to develop’, ‘to till’. The first cultivated habitats originated around 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution, that began in the Middle East. It marks the shift from nomadism to sedentism, from hunting and gathering to farming and husbandry. Humans moving from caves to houses symbolises the separation of nature and culture and thus also represents a turning-point in our dealings with other living beings: Animals and plants were domesticated, as farm animals and pets, as crops or potted plants. Cultivated habitats are villages and towns, farmland, gardens, plantations, zoos, aquariums, greenhouses, nature parks, etc. But animals, fungi and plants also create and cultivate their own habitats. In view of the loss of wilderness, the sixth mass extinction of animals and plants and the global spread of microplastics on land, in water and in the air, a rethink is urgently needed.
The trail through the Triennial therefore begins in the cultivated habitats. The focus is on five questions: what defines nature today? How do bio- and technospheres merge? Where are new forms of cohabitation taking place, and where processes of displacement? How do political habitats change? And how does the habitat earth relate to the universe?