Barren Herbarium

This Barren Herbarium from visual artist Ana Lucia Mariz, recurring to the beginnings of the invention of photography, inspired by the photogenic drawings of pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and by the experiments with cyanotype by botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799–1871), to bring to light, without the use of a photographic camera, a history of minute details and resistances – arising from the accelerated and disordered process of changes in São Paulo, Brazil. By collecting leaves, seeds, flowers and stems of plants remaining from land lots undergoing demolition, the artist operates a sort of discourse of survival regarding the marginalized and hidden elements of the history of the city’s transformation. The aim is revealed as an archaeological and botanical experiment in the chaos of São Paulo. The artist seeks to draw another sensitive and inexhaustible geography for the small living things that survive in the roughness of the times. The vulnerable bodies of these vegetal species sprout from the earth, now changed into paper, at the decisive instant at which the artist presses them against the surface and, with a piece of sandpaper, carefully copies them.