Floralia
Sabrina Ratté
Canadian Artist Sabrina Ratté makes a kind of ‘image-spaces’ to navigate and cross, in which we can enter. Her art is that of the alchemist, transforming matter into light, illusion into depth.
She melds technologies into a poetic hybrid form with holograms, photography, and 3D animation. Floralia is one of her latest works.
The writing of the influential theoretician Donna J. Haraway and science fiction writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Greg Egan was an inspiration. Ratté created a virtual reality science fiction installation with Haraway’s call for better interspecies respect in mind.
Floralia plunges us into a possible future where visual examples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room.
This archive room is sporadically affected by interference and interruptions caused by a form of living memory emanating from the listed plants that are preserved as well, revealing traces of a past that continues to haunt.
Floralia represents a future in which natural plants are scarce and the world outside has become inhabitable, making a feeling of horror seep through our experience of the beautiful imagery.
