“In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, […]
if we want to understand our future, […] we must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.”
Yual Noah Harari
Titled Atlas, my latest project is an ambitious photographic encyclopaedia. Currently in the making, the series will be arranged into twelve chapters, seemingly adhering in terms of content and form to the methodology of scientific discovery and demonstration as well as archival. However, the choice of topic in each chapter peculiarly serves no such purpose as the actual cognition: in fact, the various methods of transferring knowledge are used as devices of creating illusion. This quasi-epistemological system simultaneously employs the devices of statement and negation, reality and fiction, in each case calling on the imagination for assistance.
This selection of image pairs is from the chapter Herbarium. This is a quasi-plant collection that juxtaposes various artificial plants. Beyond their widespread decorative use as substitutes for real ones, artificial flowers are common elements of different religious, funeral and tribute commemorations. Then again, they are in fact also indispensable tools of scientific demonstration, and in a post-Anthropocene era, on account of the extinction of the original plant species, they may well be the only surviving models for reconstruction.
(Translation: Dániel Sipos)
