ALGIA NATURALIS
PUBLICATION/LP

Algia Naturalis begins with observations about plant behaviour and memory. Certain plants respond to environmental stress by developing greater resilience, passing these adaptive traits to their offspring. Others display a more immediate sensitivity. The plant Mimosa pudica, for instance, closes its leaves when touched yet gradually learns to ignore stimuli that prove harmless, suggesting a capacity to register experience and adjust its response over time.

Processes such as selective sensitivity, the coiling of tendrils or the adaptive responses observed in plants like Arabidopsis involve mechanisms of recognition retention and recall. These processes echo, in distant ways, aspects of human memory where electrochemical signals also guide responses to past events.

Algia Naturalis approaches these observations speculatively. The project imagines a plant world susceptible to emotional states such as melancholy nostalgia or mourning. It proposes the possibility of an inner life in plants granting them a form of autonoetic awareness, the ability to situate themselves in relation to past and future and thus to register loss or anticipation.

Developed within the grounds of Altrecht GGZ at the forested site of Willen Arntsz Hoeve where vegetation forms a dominant presence the installation places plants at the centre of its narrative. Addressed in a tone of longing and quiet displacement they appear as carriers of psychological resonance within the landscape.

Clients from the institution were invited to contribute associative elements to the project offering a name a sound a scent an image or another fragment of perception to this evolving botanical constellation.

In addition to the printed matter, a 7” record was produced in collaboration with Christelle Gualdi and Mireille Speekenbrink. The audio tracks combine field recordings of the natural environment surrounding Willem Arntsz Hoeve with spoken word poetry performed by the two collaborators.

*In the spring of 2014 Ola Vasiljeva was invited to the artist residency Het Vijfde Seizoen located on the grounds of the psychiatric institution Altrecht Mental Health at Willem Arntsz Hoevein in Den Dolder.

During the residency Vasiljeva developed a project that speculatively approached the mental and emotional states of the plants growing in the surrounding forest landscape.*