Rosa+, la domestication du vivant
rose stems bearing flowers, 2018
Like a refused gift, a failed attempt at seduction, a non-negotiable break, anger, a bouquet of roses is lying on the floor. Unless the bouquet was just good enough for the trash?
Rose has made a singular ally in man, he cultivates it, cares for it, admires it, and has made it a symbol of beauty and love. His admiration led him to cultivate it always better, ever more, until the life of the rose was only artificial, a slavery, a torture, a eugenic industrial production.
These hybridized, mutated, genetically transformed and cloned plants are grown on a large scale around the world so that their sexual organs (flowers) can be regularly harvested, conveyed, sold, then offered, discarded and incinerated. Beauty and love, for those who always want more.
The industry transforms everything that is beautiful into ugly. Fuck industry, fuck technological promises, fuck optimization, fuck slavery, fuck castration, fuck hierarchy, fuck submission, fuck shit life.
The treatment of these roses, whose candor is usually admired, reflects the relationship between modern man and life, nature, non-humans and other humans.
The + makes reference to the H + symbol of transhumanism, and the Rosa genre here could be human as well.
Beyond its symbolism related to beauty or love, the rose is a vanity.
The following quote from Ausone illustrates this idea very well:
" I marvelled at the swift ruin wrought by the fleeting season, to see the roses all withered even while they bloom. See, even while I speak, a glowing flower has shed the ruddy honours of its head, and earth gleams carpeted with crimson. These many forms, these various births and changes, one day brings forth and the same day ends.
Nature, we grieve that such beauty is short-lived : once displayed to our eyes forthwith you snatch away your gifts. As long as is one day, solong is the life of the rose ; her brief youth and age go hand in hand. The flower which the bright Morning Star beheld just being born, that, returning with late evening, he sees a withered thing. (Loeb Classics, Ausonius, translation: Hugh. G. Evelyn White, 1921)
The work was conceived especially for the exhibition "50 shades of pink", 59 Rivoli, Paris 2018.