Strike! An Accidental Return to Wild

When machines stop and mowers fall silent, the city exposes its hidden pulses. Beneath trimmed lawns and neat borders, life slips beyond the scripts we assumed it had to obey. A strike—collective refusal over wages and conditions—usually registers as a rupture: routines halt, services pause, control falters. Yet, in that suspension, normality unravels and something unexpected unfolds. In the spring of 2024, a months-long halt in the gardening service of a Spanish town let vegetation leap curbs, thread cracks, and overtake squares. Workers, institutions, and the living became actors in an improvised performance.

Grass tangled in medians, weeds pushed into pavements, flowers redrew corners. Getxo, a mid-sized Atlantic municipality, was the stage. It became, temporarily, an untidy artifact—a patchwork of spontaneities that made every programmed aesthetic constraint look like a surpassed absurdity. Plants, long treated as background ornament, revealed their power to subvert the norm. They trespassed, infiltrated, reframed: a quiet defiance that exposed the limits of our order. What might appear as neglect instead discloses the city’s latent vitality—its capacity to reorganize beyond human design. Such an interruption exposed the urban milieu as a hybrid entanglement—part infrastructure, part organism—where biological agency quietly persists beyond scheduled oversight.

During this intermediate season, wildness released its latent potential—an echo of the Greek physis, a generative force. It asserted itself within the built environment, revealing temporalities and processes—growth, dispersal, survival—that quietly dismantled expectations of order, hygiene, and aesthetic neatness. Yet, this very resurgence, this lapse in human dominion, opened a vacuum where other impulses surfaced. The same freedom that lets plants run wild can also unloose other drives—littering, dumping, neglect—that corrode the shared right to the city. Wildness cuts both ways. Botanical and social movements run in parallel, each revealing the fault lines of care and structure that shape how the city is inhabited and contested.

Plant blindness frames the scene: habitual inattention that has normalized neglect, masked agency, and enables careless interventions.¹ In the pause, that blindness cracks. Vegetation moves in, asserts, reclaims. Humans stumble through it—some pausing, some panicking, some ignoring, a few reflecting. Chaos becomes a mirror through which perception is bound to reawaken, revealing the limits of norm and the inconsistency of domination.

The strike enacts an accidental poetics—work conflict, naked biology, uncontrolled growth—catalyzing a temporary collective artwork. It emerges from absence: the workers’ decision to stop, the plants’ insistence, the city’s contingent infrastructures. It is not curated, not designed, not staged: no authorship, only suspension and overflow. Life does its work; humans react. The piece unfolds in real time—ephemeral, messy, slightly defiant. Gilles Clément’s notion of art involontaire fits the moment: art born of interruption, authored by no one, fleeting and unclaimed.² It lives in the cracks of routine, reveals itself only to those willing to look, and vanishes before it can be seized. Michael Jakob’s reflections on landscape echo the same logic—the urban fabric is not a static canvas but a field of negotiation, a friction between construction and persistence, a rehearsal of order and its undoing.³ In this sense, the city under strike becomes an involuntary composition—a choreography of withdrawal and insistence, where plants, workers, and matter conspire to show that creation sometimes begins when rule loosens.

A labor conflict, born of inequality and fatigue, also triggers other perceptions, opening a slit in the city’s cycles. Observation is drawn out of emergency—the reactive, the momentary—and invited into urgency: sustained, attentive engagement with what persists beyond planned guidelines. In her essay “Turning,” Irit Rogoff proposes “turning” as a practice for generating alternative narratives, new sites of observation, and spaces of transdisciplinary inquiry within pedagogical, artistic, and curatorial practices.⁴ This shift demands a decentering of the anthropocentric view of nature, opening possibilities for more balanced coexistence between human societies and the biological cycles that sustain them. It calls for attunement to local habitats, sensitivity to the rhythms of other species, and recognition of ecological processes as active participants rather than backdrop. Through collaborative networks, observation becomes a civic practice—one that cultivates curiosity, care, and sustained attentiveness, keeping open the possibility of a shared, entangled life.

Such interruptions are not mere urban accidents but moments of awakening. They urge us to rethink our relationship with the living, prompting a critical reassessment of the urban environment. We are cohabitants within a larger web of reciprocity. Bringing this awareness into the civic sphere means cultivating an ecological literacy that recognizes the agency of plants and the vitality of ecosystems interwoven with daily life. It is not a call to idealize nature or romanticize mess, but to acknowledge that urban life itself is porous and alive—an evolving composition of human and nonhuman intentions that demands respect and attentiveness.

In an age of intersecting environmental, economic, and social crises, what falters is a conscious sense of identity. Humanity reveals, through the repetitive attempts to reconfigure civilization models, a failure of the narratives through which it comes to understand itself. Decentering the human viewpoint, then, is not an act of loss but of recognition—a chance to rediscover who we are within the wider ecology that sustains us. It invites us to interrupt the habits of domination and detachment that have long defined progress, and to imagine coexistence not as compromise but as belonging. A turning is intellectual, affective, and political. It asks us to unlearn mastery, to listen where we once imposed, to be moved by what grows, insists, and persists despite us. Identity, in that sense, is recast through relation: from center to one voice among many in a collective composition.

Three months passed, an agreement on salary raises closed the conflict. Mowers roared back, the grass was cut, and everything slipped once more into managed rhythms—predictable, polished, forgetful. Yet something had already shifted. For one un-pristine season, plants had claimed the streets, insects had swarmed the edges, and the town had revealed a raw, breathing biodiversity never seen before. That brief lapse was less a rupture than a revelation—an unplanned provocation that could have sensitized the public, stirred institutional debate, and exposed the benefits of allowing partially self-regulated wildlife into urban life. It suggested that stewardship does not mean subjection, that care can begin with letting go. Perhaps the fragile lesson of the strike is this: when order is suspended, what was long hidden breathes again—the city pulses with a life suppressed beneath the obsession of urban tidiness. Or perhaps all of it will linger only as memory—exuberant, turbulent, provocative. Either way, the episode resists erasure. It lingers as a call for action: to imagine, to contest, and to rehearse urban models that are more attentive, more just, and more entangled with the other lives that share the city.