Most art about automation looks at factories, offices or warehouses — places where work was already mechanical and got more so. Špela Petrič has gone somewhere more uncomfortable: the greenhouse, where the thing being automated is care, and the thing being cared for is alive.
Eating Back, at Cukrarna in Ljubljana from September 10 to November 29, 2026, curated by Alenka Trebušak, is built from what the artist describes as tactical and poetic gestures performed in Dutch greenhouses, examining the automation of care and its social and ecological consequences.
Why greenhouses are the right site
Dutch horticulture is the most technologically intensive plant cultivation on the planet. Light, temperature, humidity, CO₂, nutrient delivery and harvest timing are sensed continuously and adjusted by control systems. Plants are grown in engineered substrate under artificial light on a schedule optimised for yield. It is, functionally, a data centre for tomatoes.
That makes it the clearest existing example of something the rest of us are being promised: attention to living needs, delivered by machines, at scale, more consistently than a human could manage. The greenhouse has already run that experiment for decades, and the results are visible and measurable.
Petrič has worked at the intersection of biology and art for years — her practice involves actual laboratory and horticultural work rather than representation of it — which is what makes the phrase “performed in Dutch greenhouses” load-bearing. These are gestures made inside a functioning industrial system, not staged elsewhere.
The idea worth carrying out of it
“Care” is the word doing the most work. Industrial horticulture demonstrates that you can meet every measurable need of a living thing — light, water, nutrition, protection — through a system with no interest in it whatsoever. Everything quantifiable is optimised. Whether anything is lost when attention becomes purely instrumental is precisely what the metrics can’t tell you.
That question is about to be asked of care for people, by systems marketed on exactly the same logic: more consistent, more available, cheaper, better instrumented. Art that goes and looks at the place where the experiment has already run for decades is more useful than art that speculates about the future of it.
Eating Back also inverts the usual direction. Not what we do to plants, but what comes back — a title that suggests consumption in both directions, and consequences that return along the supply chain.
Worth noting for anyone planning a visit: Cukrarna’s 2026 programme has had several shows shift or cancel, so confirm dates with the venue before travelling.