Science/Fiction — A Non-History of Plants

In development since 2020, the exhibition Science/Fiction — A Non-History of Plants retraces the visual history of plants through art, technology, and science from the nineteenth century to the present day. Bringing together over 40 artists from different periods and nationalities, this exhibition juxtaposes historic photographic works such as Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes, Karl Blossfeldt’s inventory of plant forms and Laure Albin Guillot’s microscope experiments with creations by contemporary artists such as Jochen Lempert, Pierre Joseph, Angelica Mesiti, Agnieszka Polska, and Sam Falls.

Divided into six chapters, this exhibition’s structure is inspired by science fiction novels: Starting from the idea of a stable and identifiable world, it gradually descends into uncertain and unexpected landscapes. The first two chapters, entitled ‘The Agency of Plants’ and ‘Symbiosis and Contamination’ respectively, are devoted to so-called objective approaches connected to science. The following chapter, entitled ‘Beyond the Real’, is devoted to transcending the visible. The last three chapters, ‘Plants are Watching You’, ‘Plants as Political Fiction’ and ‘Speculative Fiction(s)’, explore the links between science and science fiction, two fields that have used flora as a field for experimentation. Transcending the normative divisions between fiction and reality, science and art, the artists in this exhibition go beyond rigid categories to capture the complexity of plant life and our relationship with plants.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the special relationship between photography and video, two techniques for capturing images that were first used for scientific research, and plants. Paradoxically, instead of creating a distance between us and the natural world, these photographic and cinematic processes have highlighted plants’ subjectivity, intelligence, and expressive capacity, compensating for our ‘anthropocentric myopia’.

By questioning our projections and representations of plants, this exhibition integrates narratives from science and science fiction as a means of creating new imaginary worlds. These narratives are not centred on the idea of progress and modernity, but rather are conceived in terms of the planet’s limits. These emancipatory stories go beyond an anthropocentric vision of the world, giving plants a place and a voice. They thus become a space for repairing our relationship with the natural world. To think about environmental change, we need to consider the political power of the imagination, to accept our hopes and explore our innermost fears, so that together we can continue to write a common future.