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Camila Salame


     

 

 

Florilegio

 Botanics of an emotional landscape

 

 

Fecit amor Vatem; fecit me Flora poetam /  Love made the poet. Flora made me a poet

 

 

José Celestino Mútis

 

 

 

Herbarium, selection of Bogota’s Eastern Hills native plants set up on a floral wallpaper. Mixed media installation.

 

 

Detail of the work

 

With this project I seek to explore the emotional landscapes shaped by our geographical and natural landmarks. Through a dialogue between art and nature, I wish to evoke the desire for a home - as an intimate and personal – a mobile space that one carries with oneself.

 

I grew up in Bogota, capital and largest city in Colombia, located in the high altitude environment of the Andes. The mountains to the east of the city are its most striking landmark, where a huge variety of fauna and flora peculiar to these reliefs flourishes. For years, these mountains formed an important part of my personal emotional landscape and determined a biological sense of direction in the city in which I lived.

 

When I moved to Paris, I realized that I had lost all orientation. Having no longer the eastern mountains of Bogota as a point of reference to locate myself, I experienced a troubling form of loss of directions.

 

Despite their status as a protected area, the eastern mountains of Bogotá are still located in an urban area of €‹€‹10 million inhabitants, and suffer from illegal constructions, mining activities, pollution and frequent fires. Today, sadly, many native plant species are disappearing. The Florilegio installation is thus a way of symbolically preserving and a way of keeping a trace of these endangered plants that constitute the cultural and natural wealth of the Bogotá region. And beyond this, it is a personal attempt to preserve the memories of a lived space that constitutes my original emotional landscape.

 

The use of wallpaper, a material that evokes domestic reminiscence, allows me to create a familiar space and thus, by this gesture, to reclaim a lost geography of affect. Through the recreation of my original emotional landscape in a domesticated and intimate space, I try to find my own place.

 

 

Scientific and common names of some native flower plants of the mountains of Bogota represented in Florilegio

 

 

*The term florilegium is  from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers. It also applied literally to a treatise on flowers or medieval books that are dedicated to ornamental rather than the medicinal or utilitarian plants covered by herbals. The emergence of botanical illustration as a genre of art dates back to the 15th century, when herbals, books describing the culinary and medicinal uses of plants, were printed containing illustrations of flowers. As printing techniques advanced, and new plants came to Europe from Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century, wealthy individuals and botanic gardens commissioned artists to record the beauty of these exotics in Florilegia. Florilegia flourished in the 17th century when they were created to portray rare and exotic plants from far afield. Modern florilegia seek to record collections of plants, often now endangered, from within a particular garden or place. 

 

 

 

 

          Details of the work