FINE ARTS

Asia Lapai – ICI UNE PLANTE A ÉTÉ VOLÉE PAR UNE PERSONNE SANS SCRUPULE ET SANS RESPECT POUR NOTRE COLLECTION

by Asia Lapai

"THIS PLANT HAS BEEN STOLEN BY A PERSON WITHOUT SCRUPLES AND WITHOUT RESPECT FOR OUR COLLECTION" is a sentence taken from the signs in the greenhouse of the Geneva Botanical Garden, added when a plant goes missing. It opens a reflection on exoticism as a production of narratives and power relations, structured by the opposition between "here" and "elsewhere". Little Chewy is a meeting with a dock worker from Liverpool, a former major port of the transatlantic slave trade. These fragments give rise to contradictory or revised narratives, maintained in opacity. This project questions desire, power, and representation, as well as the colonial shaping of spaces and its lasting effects on living beings, through the hypothesis of a necro-aesthetic regime.