The Extraterrestrial Botanist: phyto.portal (2017)

Installation at Maison des Arts de Laval, Ville de Laval

The Extraterrestrial Botanist imagines a world in which plants serve as guides, portals, and kin, inviting visitors to contemplate relationships that extend beyond the human, beyond the terrestrial, and beyond the familiar boundaries of sense and perception.

This immersive installation stages a speculative research station, a phyto.portal, where botanical life becomes an interface for interspecies communication. Within the space, viewers encounter fragments of scientific inquiry, field samples, and fictional artifacts from an otherworldly botanist charting Earth’s vegetal ecologies. The work blurs natural history with science fiction, proposing an expanded understanding of intelligence, memory, and companionship across worlds.

Visitors are invited to slow down, observe, and attune to the subtle signals of plants, imagining how communication might occur through chemical nuances, light-sensitive rhythms, or shared environmental pulses. Here, botany becomes a bridge to the unknown:
a site where extra-dimensional voyage, kinship, and symbiotic bonding are not only possible, but already underway.

The Extraterrestrial Botanist asks:
What might we learn if we treated plants not as specimens, but as collaborators?
What forms of care, curiosity, or wonder arise when we enter into relationship with the vegetal world as equal partners in imagination?

By weaving together ecological observation and speculative storytelling, the installation opens a doorway—a portal—into futures shaped not by extraction, but by reciprocity, sentience, and shared becoming.