It takes a lot of energy to perceive the world, and Evolution promotes energy efficiency. As a result, the human brain does a great job to learn to filter things. We lose the details of our environment as they become familiar, moving into life in a state of near automation, recognizing objects and concepts – “clothes, furniture, his wife, the fear of war”, as Viktor Shklovsky says in “Art as technique– without really seeing them. In this 1917 text, the Russian critic argued that the goal of art was to recover these things, “Make the stone stony. “More recently, a wave of scholars and artists has recognized that stone must be stony like never before: as we have gotten used to the ravages of industrialism, this automatic anthropocentric walk has plunged the world more deeply in climate disaster. Academic approaches like”Object -oriented ontology” And “The vegetable turn»Look to redirect our perception of reality so that nature comes back to the point.
A border of this battle was to tackle “plant blindness” or the post-industrial tendency to ignore the life of plants to the point of its invisibility. (When the names, types and uses of the plants were formerly of public notoriety, they now dissolve in an amorphous green background.) The book Science / fiction: a non-history of plants (2025) and its support exhibitionWho opened its doors to the European house of photography in Paris and went to Foto Arsenal Wein in October, is part of this wider thrust for the recent botany.
Written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Natsumi Tanaka, and Michael Marder and Edited by European House of Photography, Victoria Aresheva, and Clothilde Morette, Science fiction Weaves an eclectic photo history of plants from the 19th century to the present day, moving non -chronologically between works like “Asplenium Angustifolium” by Anna Atkins – one of its emblematic cyanotypes of the Ferns – and the film by Stan Brakhage of 1981 “Garden of Earthly Delight”, in which the filmmaker joined the plants directly to cinematographic cells transported. He calls into question the boundaries between man and nature, but also seeks to break the line of demarcation between art and science, which gives an equal weight to Laure Albin-Guillot of the 1930s pierced in photomicrography (that Albin-Guillot herself labeled as “decorative”) and contemporary pieces by Sam fallswhich composes and captures the indexing impressions of plants on canvas and ceramics. As an object, the book connects these disparate pieces, taking many unexpected visual kinship between the work of different contexts.
Like many attempts to reconsider the historical barrel of art these days, Science fiction uses a thematic structure. A descent of this non-historical method is that it sometimes overestimates the novelty of plants as a force majeure in science fiction; The sub-genre of the killer plant is At least as old as Anna AtkinsAnd certainly more neglected. Similarly, he underestimates the enthusiasm of amateur botany of the 19th century which catalyzed the work of Atkins. Aristocratic scholars like William Henry Fox Talbot have developed new visual tools (such as photography!) In part to catalog their colonial creators in constant expansion, indirectly leading to technologies that allow our ways of seeing modern. The thirst for exotic plants of this century is perhaps the opposite of today's vegetable blindness, and it is born of a dynamic tradition of Sci-fi of the Gothic plant This has also scrambled the boundaries between the human and vegetable effect to a strange effect. Far from passive cloves, these imagined plants were often terrifying and consumed will, engulfing botanists and protecting their native land.
At the same time, by renouncing chronology and disciplinary frameworks, Science fiction Embraces the ability of fiction to grasp the incomprehensible. How to imagine a path through the disaster otherwise? Rather than a conquest of facts or a collection of specimens, the book builds a botanical reverie. It is not a bad thing – when it comes to surviving the anthropocene, we need a little more imagination, and the dream can be an urgent job.
Science / fiction: a non-history of plants (2025), written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Natsumi Tanaka and Michael Marder; Published by European Maison de la Photography, Victoria Aresheva and Clothilde Morette; And published by Spector Books, is available in online pre-order. The book will be available for purchase on April 29.
