This text was initially published on the occasion of Manufacturing of Rights a pluridisciplinary colloquium in Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, 2015.

CASE #8

Date: 2050
Location: Smaland, Sweden

Facts:
In 2050, in Norra Kvill nationalpark, Småland, Sweden, the difficulty of distinguishing between nature and culture has led to a redefinition of the territory following the trial of Naturvårdsverket, Public Environmental Protection Agency, against the Swedish company Ölstrom Real Estate, wishing to implement habitable modules in the area.

Arguments:
The rejection of binaries reciprocally affected sex-gender and nature-culture concepts. A multitude of sexes proliferate and individuals are no longer designated as belonging to gender, as genders are definitively troubled; geographical areas are equally concerned as the terms of nature and culture now fail to qualify them. Sweden was a pioneer in the recognition of the third kind and the third earth. Naja Ölstrom, whose sex remains indiscern- ible, makes artistic and real estate documentaries to offer museographical living spaces for sale, an historical and educational adventure that showcases the evolution of society and its past excesses.

References:
The text is notably built on the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling dealing with the duality of biology in a social world, as well as on the collective publication The Moral Authority of Nature edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, which is interested in the outlook on the idea of nature and especially the use made of this concept to classify acts against nature. This is science fiction writing through the practice of estrangement analyzed by Carlo Ginsburg in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, which consists in looking at the world not as it is given but as it could be built.