Presented as a cabinet of future curiosities, the Flora Incognita (unknown flowers) float like hybrid creatures on a neutral base – an historical reference to the specimens drowned in formaldehyde jars that can still be seen in natural science museums. Here, however, the plants are in perpetual movement, in continuous mutation as if what they wanted was to avoid any kind of classification, any inveigling of their essence. The beauty of these unknown flowers strengthens the trouble of their moving identity, reminding us that everything is just transformation. The specimens on show in the Salon Rouge were created and trained to sing opera. An audio work by Sébastien Lipszyc will remind the visitor of the strange feeling of the HAL computer’s tired singing of Daisy Bell at 2001: A Space Odyssey. Besides, Opera Cantus Flora pays homage to the hypnotic world of the Vermilion Sands seaside world imagined by J.G. Ballard in his short-story collection of the same name.
Like specimens on display in natural history museums, the Floras Incognitas belong in a cabinet of future curiosities. They are the outcome of research by the Post Natural Museum into the creation of simultaneously organic and inorganic mutant flowers. These hybrid creatures are the subject of photogrammetric scanning reconstructed as photographs and videos. In a world in which everything seems to have already been inventoried and put in a hierarchy – in other words, a world achieved - the Unknown Flowers show the beauty of their twisting and in their endless movement a fictional, lyrical evolution in the transformation of the living being.
