VIVARIUM

Inter-relationships between Plants, Fungi & Humans

VIVARIUM is a collaborative research project that intends to encode morphological and molecular characteristics of living organisms in an effort to create a common dialogue among species, giving nature an active role within the artistic production.

Emerging from a mutualist onception of creation between biology, botanics, and art, VIVARIUM arises as a utopian vision redefining the power structures between humans and nature, transforming them into contributors to their own hybrid art space. Since the dawn of time, Nature has acted as a self-creator, yet throughout the Anthropocene humans have transgressed natural laws, imposing hegemonic systems of making, disrupting existing ecosystems, and thus altering the natural cycle of existence.

Throughout the domestication of living beings, humans have created an artificial Nature, intrinsically linked to the existing one. The moment has come when humans need to redefine ways of coexisting, as the line between what is natural and what is artificial has become imperceptible to the eye. As artificiality has blended into the pure existence of the body.

The project consists of a series of sculptures/habitats built in collaboration with plants, fungi, and other living beings. The present bodies, that are being actively involved in the artistic process, are elements of the biosphere of Brandenburg’s region. In a way, they have contributed to the imaginary of the human actors behind this project, enriching the visual is a collaborative mutualist understanding of the surroundings.

The artist, as a facilitator in this installation, exalts the aesthetic and sensorial qualities of plants for the collective construction of experiences and spaces around them, which aims to unleash the phenomenological power of plants. This environment built by means of interrelationships between biomaterials like sound, light, and living organisms, will be the entity with which the beholder will be challenged, embodied in a sculpture.

Project funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media