This film captures the intrusion of two people into a garden in Vincennes at night, in order to illuminate a dandelion bed and to provoke its bloom. This artificial lighting offers the spectacle of their live blooming. Midway between the poetic experience, the reprehensible action, the scientific expedition and the reportage, this event disturbs and forces the natural cycle of this perennial plant associated with the world of childhood and the imaginary. It links the banal to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural.

Producer : Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (France)

Performance : Dimitri Afanasenko

Purchased from the Kamel Mennour gallery in 2015

This installation evokes the Musa, the Latin name for the banana tree. This tree, whose fruit is one of the most eaten in the world, is at the heart of a paradox. Although its flower is known to treat the uterus, its exploitation has become the symbol of an ecological and health scandal. The Chlordecone, a pesticide used in banana plantations, has permanently poisoned the soil and affected the health of the West Indians and Caribbeans. The space of gentleness and healing created by the artist intertwines a story about female sexuality with a legacy of colonial history and slavery in Guadeloupe.

Purchased from the artist in 2020

IAC Collection, Villeurbanne/Rhône Alpes

If Western philosophy and contemporary lifestyles tend to separate humanity from Nature, Melanie Bonajo proposes a change of perspective: more connected and empathetic with the living world. In a forest in the Netherlands, a community is invited to have a psychedelic experience that opens up the awareness of the equal place of humans alongside all other life forms. The adornments made of plants and artificial objects, the dances and the ritual music are filmed and commented by a narrator: the Voice of Nature who invites us to a reconnection with the Earth.

Translation, subtitling and encoding: Roberta Virginia Rossi-Genillier and Constanza Bertella – MAMAC production

Painter and experimental filmmaker of the New York scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Marie Menken lets her camera wander through the heart of a garden. The succession of wide and close-up shots, the changes of scale, the slow, jerky or rapid movements offer a non-human perspective on the vegetal. Bird calls, insect noises, and the scraping of plants that compose the rhythmic and strident soundtrack, increase this other perception, creating a dimension of strangeness. The flowers no longer seem ornamental but promise a feast for the fauna that inhabits it.

The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

The performer films the drifting of a female silhouette that she has made out of peonies and placed on a wooden raft covered with purple velvet. This ritual offering submitted to the primordial forces of nature invokes a passage from the living to the non-living, from the human to the plant. Deeply attached to her native land, the artist is influenced by Santería (a syncretic belief system that blends Christianity and Yoruba mythology, brought to the Caribbean by slaves from present-day Nigeria and Benin). 

Super-8 mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent 

Estate of the artist & Galerie Lelong & Co, New York

In the archives of the Cape Town Botanical Gardens, South Africa, Uriel Orlow found a documentary from 1963 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the place. Western visitors and scientists are the most part of the characters, while native South Africans only appear as workers, relegated to the background. We are in the middle of the Apartheid period* and Africans are excluded from this celebration, as they are in this colonial society. Orlow invites the South African actress Lindiwe Matshikiza to perform in front of these images as an attempt to restabilise the balance of power and to allow reappropriation. 

* Racial segregation in South Africa, established in 1948, abolished on 8 May 1996.