sightseeing
The city is a place of human concentration whose primary objective is the balance between maximizing the productive efficiency of its inhabitants and the quality of their lives. Thus architecture must occasionally yield space to green areas—places that help maintain the citizen’s essential closeness to nature and thereby improve daily life.
Contrary to what would naturally occur, however, these areas are controlled spaces: a new, confined biome actively maintained within clearly defined limits that reinvents the bucolic experience. Both inside this new controlled natural environment and outside it—on balconies, in squares, displayed in shop windows or simply sold from street stalls—the true ambassadors of the city’s natural image appear: flowers. In nature these serve the fundamental function of attracting pollinating insects and thus play a necessary role within the life cycle of flora and fauna; in the urban environment they perform the role of decoration and symbol. From active participants the flowers become a crystallization of beauty and, unintentionally, a morbid symbol of immobility, manifesting even as artificial reproductions of themselves, impervious to the passage of time.
The photographic research presented in this work begins precisely with the observation of the relationship between city and flower and proceeds from simple questions: “How do flowers arrive in a city? What stages does their journey follow? Who cares for them in public and private spaces? What is their final destination?”
A first chapter of this research records those places — far too common in our cities — where fatal road accidents have occurred, transformed by the placement of floral bouquets on poles and railings by the victims’ loved ones and other citizens into sites of commemoration and protest. What does the contrast between flower and city provoke in this particular context? The modern city, which advances promises of ecological renewal and reforestation, stops short in front of the jarring effect of these images, where the flower (or often a reproduction of it) becomes at once witness to a preventable death and the sole fragment of natural beauty amid concrete.