the greyhouse / yesterday’s plants

2024 (ongoing)

a greenhouse turned grey : installation and research on extinct plant species

a continuation of my MA graduation project

while the extinction of animal species is known to most people, only very few would know what Acanea exigua, Hopea Shingkeng or Galipea ossana were. what remains of them and other extinct plant species are their flatly pressed specimens, stored in herbal archives around the world which are kept in folders and remain mostly invisible to the public.
collaborating with several botanic institutions, the greyhouse uses these specimens as the basis for big scale installations that showcase an artificial landscape of worldwide extinct plants: three-dimensional collages made from black and white printed and laser-cut photographs of the specimens re-imagine the shapes of the extinct plants that have been lost in the pressing process, lingering between reality and speculation, between past and future. realized in black and white, in non-colors, the landscape takes on a dystopic character, as if the plants were ghosts that don’t belong to this world anymore.

the installations visualize the impossible try of making a photographic archive live again – of preserving something that has already disappeared.

for more info click here

installing the collages behind glass

assembling