“Botanica” is a photographic, multidisciplinary and educational project that procures the revalorization of urban flora as nature. So often, people that live in cities do not perceive the natural elements in their urban centers as nature. Instead, they’re usually regarded as pests and weeds.

Urban flora and fauna often play essential roles in the functioning of urban habitats. For example, urban reforestation is a great way to cool down cities and manage rainwater.

I was incited to create a project specific to Florence’s urban flora by Singulart and SACI Florence. For this, I was inspired by Botticelli’s painting Primavera, in which at least 138 species of plants are depicted. The work serves as a botanical catalogue and illustration of neo-platonic ideas of the era.

This image acts as a point of departure to explore the change and loss of biodiversity through a centuries-old ideology of separation of nature and human exceptionalism. It establishes the natural world as a bigger context for the unfolding of human culture.

Eco-social sustainability is a core element of my process, my conceptual exploration. In this sense, the process is as much the artwork as the resulting images. My focus has been the creation of sustainable networks through radical empathy and adapting my production needs to the local systems to reduce my carbon footprint while creating the artworks.

The images created are explorations of the convergence between social and environmental ecologies. Through these portraits, I can take the pulse of the city and its human and non-human inhabitants. Which plants and people live above the liminal spaces of Florence, who gets to cross that line, and their relationship to each other.

I offer the public a series of testimonials of forgotten places and underlooked beauty resulting from a centuries-old ideology of separation of nature and human hierarchization and exceptionalism. I present this work hoping to spark empathy and new paths to building a harmonious socio-ecological environment.

These philosophies nuance our perception of our surroundings, avoiding harmful dichotomic categories such as natural and unnatural, alive and not alive, human and non-human, male and female. By integrating these ideologies, I can set conceptual frameworks for decolonizing my artistic practice. This leads to a more harmonious integration of a plurality of visions giving me and my work a more complete and fair view of the world.

Through these lenses and applying empathy and understanding, I can explore and subvert some of these dogmatic dualistic concepts making parallels between human and natural ecologies: invasive vs. local, useful vs. weed (pest), living vs. nonliving, and human vs. sub-human.

“Botanica” inscribes itself within a larger vision that aims to create harmonious human and natural ecologies that lead to the representation of possible viable futures, giving intrinsic values to all beings and living with dignity within planetary boundaries.