Exhibition
TRAVELLING PLANTS - TRANSDISCIPLINARY PROJECT
The first phase of the project commenced in early March, 2024 bringing together five visual and research-based artists from India, Sri Lanka, France and Germanyfor a research-focused residency at The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP). IFP is a research institution established in 1956, with a herbarium containing over 27,875 specimens of trees, shrubs, herbs, fungi and algae from India and around the world.
During the four week residency, artists Karolina Grzywnowicz (Germany), Wendy Therméa (Reunion Island, France), Danushka Marasinghe (Sri Lanka), Waylon D’souza (India) and Rashmimala (India) were presented with a diverse programme which included workshops on cyanotypes and botanical drawing, a series of lectures and presentations from experts that took them us into the histories, uses and journeys of plants and the opportunity to directly interact with scientists and technicians across departments at IFP, including social sciences, ecology, indology, geomatics and the photo archives.
In these hands-on interactions, the five artists also dissected flowers, inspected pollen under the microscope, and understood how palm leaf manuscripts have historically been assembled. While spending time on individual research, they also embarked on several field trips with researchers and botanists, visiting the Auroville Botanical Garden, the Pichavaram mangrove, and the exhibition ‘Plants from Tranquebar’ at the Maritime Museum in Tharangambadi, created in collaboration with IFP’s department of ecology. Collecting their own plant samples at Aranya, a reforested sanctuary in Auroville, they learned the method for preparing, drying and stitching their own herbarium sheets.
During the residency, the artists also engaged in a knowledge exchange, sharing their work with each other and the researchers through presentations, and discussing the ways in which their own creative practices were responding to the many streams of research they encountered at IFP.
Upon the culmination of the residency, the artists returned to their personal studios, to further develop ideas sparked during their residency. Exploring varied historical and contemporary sociocultural, political and environmental concerns, and presenting them through their own lenses, the five artists will showcase their work at the Travelling Plants exhibition heralding the second phase of this collaborative project.
Travelling Plants opens in Chennai on14th June,and remains onview until 29th June at Alliance Française of Madras. Just as plants are understood to travel, the exhibition will travel across six venues in India and Sri Lanka in 2024 and 2025.