JOURNEY #01

2014

Artist Book, with Jorge Almeida

“Cryptogamic plants are liable to bud-variation, for fronds on the same fern often display remarkable deviations of structure. Spores, which are of the nature of buds, taken from such abnormal fronds, reproduce, with remarkable fidelity, the same variety, after passing through the sexual stage.”

“This fruit is remarkable on account of the number of species which have been cultivated, and from their rapid improvement within the last fifty or sixty years. Most of the largest cultivated strawberries are the descendants of F. grandiflora or chiloensis, and I have seen no account of these forms in their wild state.”

For Journey #01, me and my friend and designer Jorge Almeida approached a peri-urban area in the outskirts of our hometown and walked alongside roads, marginal lands, abandoned fields and fallow territory. We were attracted to these places where the apparent sense of wilderness is, nevertheless, contaminated by the human presence. Our attention was deflected to the wild plants that grow under the influence of cultural and agricultural practices, thus living in a defiant space between wilderness and unintentional domestication.
Darwin's book "The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication", from which we adapted text excerts to go with the images, presents us with a reminder that very few things in the world remain in their wild, original state, and that the human influence on the environment is ever-present and overarching.

Artist Book
24 pages
28 x 21 cm
Digital Print
Hand Bound
Ed. 2 AP

Finalist at Unseen Dummy Award 2014
Finalist at Dummy Award Kassel 2015
Part of On Landscape Project, Matèria Gallery, Rome, 2015