Rooted Resurgence

Digital Render, size variable, 2023 — ongoing

Special Mention in Re:Touch. Expanded Surfaces in Smartphone Photography, metaLAB Harvard & FU Berlin

Rooted Resurgence emerged from a critical engagement with the plant collection of the Palermo Botanical Garden. Since Palermo was one of the largest ports of the African slave trade in early modern Europe, and botanical gardens are not only a place of education but also complicit in the history of colonialism, the exploitation of land and people is closely linked here as well. Since collecting biological material is strictly forbidden there, Point Cloud scans were taken with a smartphone.

Digitizing these fragments offers the possibility of giving the resulting 3D objects a new existence in virtual space. Within the framework of the digital and the virtual, new links and combinations can be created by adding a history of transformation to the plants and their history of violence.