Which is better? A short-lived fresh flower in a garden or an eternal dry flower in a herbarium?
Vladimir Jankélévitch
As they were keen to make combined use of their collections, the Pays de la Loire Regional Contemporary Art Collection (FRAC) and the Musée d’arts de Nantes have created two crossover exhibitions comparing works — photographs, drawings, sculptures and paintings – by different artists and from different eras. Plants and People examines the notions of conservation and preservation, fundamental to art collections, by drawing alternately on the metaphor of plant life (at the Museum) and the theme of animals (at the FRAC in Carquefou).
Making a poetically pacifist argument, the exhibition at the Museum of Arts explores the relationships between plants and people through a range of aesthetics and artistic gestures. The works on display reveal the invisible tensions between living things, their fragility and capacity for resistance, as well as the way in which artists depict this desire to preserve what might so easily disappear. A reflection that resonates in particular in the Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze’s work Invasions, which draws a parallel between invasive plants and the rationales behind human conquest, expressing the inexpressible, the trauma of war in particular.
Plants and People also covers the history of botanical representations, through the herbariums in Nantes’ Botanical Garden. These collections of dried plants, dating from the 19th to the 21st century, bear witness to humankind’s desire to observe and classify the species that compose the plant kingdom.
In the works brought together here, landscapes seem vulnerable and unstable, marked by the impermanence of forms and cycles of life. Between contemplation and disquiet, the fragile beauty of ecosystems reveals a precarious balance and the tensions between nature and human history. Marked by intimate and collective narratives alike, the land inhabited by humankind preserves traces of the past, whether visible or buried, including the scars left by wars and the ongoing exploitation of resources.
Plants and People examines what preservation, memory and transmission mean when living things are ever impermanent.