Text on Snow on the Botanical Garden is based on a theoretical and field research conducted during a two-month residency at HIAP Helsinki during the winter of 2013. The project revolves around the display and the exhibition narrative elements at the Botanical Garden Kaisaniemi of the same city, taking advantage of the surprise generated by the fact that plants are invisible under the snow and the signs labelling the plants remain visible on the surface. The project's objective is the analysis, the reutilisation and the visualisation of certain elements of discourse, narration and legitimacy of the Botanical Garden such as the plant-labelling signs, guided tours or plantation maps. The title refers to this whole discursive textuality on the snow.
Four works resulted from this investigation, of which two are shown here: Every visible sign without visible plant consists of 220 small format photographs of all the plant-signs of the Botanical Garden which, in the winter of 2013, were notably isolated by the snow, seeming as if they were the subject of the exhibit, without a visible referent (the plants) to indicate. The photographs are taken with documentary intention, and in exhaustive detail, with the aim of displaying the plant-signs as if they were the protagonist object of the botanical garden, rather than a text referring to another object.
Signs causing mental images causing oral descriptions causing mental images is a video of the conversation between the artist and an expert in botany, a regular guide at the Botanical Garden, who tries to describe some plants hidden under the snow from a reading of the labels. Plants thus only appear through three mental images: as imagined by the guide in order to describe the plant, imagined by the artist, listening to his description, and imagined by the viewer of the video. Plants hidden under the snow, like their names on the signs, act as a narrative trigger, becoming representative, as physical descriptions, tangible, of their entire species.
With the collaboration of the Botanical Garden Kaisaniemi and supported by HIAP and Fundación Especial Caja Madrid.