Florilegium [Signed]

Texts: Emanuele Coccia, Joan Fontcuberta, Valentin Vallhonrat
Images: Joan Fontcuberta, Manuel Castels
Universidad de Navarra (paq. 21)
Graphic design Jordi Ortiz
Printing SYL

University of Navarra Museum

"Using Artificial Intelligence, Fontcuberta builds in 'Florilegium' a fabulous imaginary flora like the one that captivated 18th century explorers on their travels

Joan Fontcuberta is interested in nature photography to get to the nature of photography. With this purpose he has carried out numerous projects in which plants and vegetables have been the protagonists, such as the Herbarium series (1982-85). Four decades later, he remakes this series and proposes new imaginary species. If in the first work he parodied the photographs of botanical specimens taken by Karl Blossfeldt, in Florilegium he replaces the collage of objects and conventional photography with new algorithmic visualization tools, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) mechanisms.

In another twist, the artist created a series of landscapes with an emphasis on trees and bushes, flowers and fruits, like those that amazed the explorers embarked on scientific expeditions throughout the 18th century. Except that we no longer have to limit this Terra Incognita to the geographical area but rather it can expand into the universe of new imaginaries, to virtual life and to the impressive hallucinatory capacity of the most advanced generative visualization technologies.

Florilegium takes its title from the homonymous poem by Lucretius (On the Nature of Things, in Spanish), from the 1st century BC. C., a tribute to Epicurus, the philosopher who founded a school of thought on the outskirts of Athens and called it “The Garden.” Unlike other academies, “The Garden” admitted women and slaves. In it, Epicurean thinkers developed philosophical concepts such as πρoληψις (prolepsis), praesumptiones, anticipations or anteceptions, which evoke what would be model-images or general concepts of things, constituted by empirical experiences accumulated in our memory."