Jury’s choice n°1

Trajectories is more than an itinerary, it’s an intimate part of my personal story.

On the way to the hospital, there’s a botanical garden. The gigantic exuberant Monsteras Deliciosas posted at the entrance of the garden gave me a weird feeling when I passed by them for the first time. In Brazil, my mother’s house walls are covered up by the same plants. Here, though in the middle of winter, they fall out on faux tropical wall units.

If you pay closer attention, you’ll discover the grid that supports them: modern greenhouses, humidifiers, irrigation hoses and electric cables. Life is maintained by artificial structures, just like in the hospital, located a few meters from there. These structures are so different and so similar at the same time. Places of dream and lucidity, interdependency, stability and instability, artificiality and vulnerability.

I look at these tropical and exotic plants as if they were a mirror. I can see my body as vulnerable and strange as these plants are. Fed by devices, wires and electrodes, measured, studied and treated. Bodies and plants, strangers to the places they are living in, dream of being somewhere else. Each step reveals different parts of that trajectory.

There’s some beauty among the strangeness of these places: living beings trying to create connections, through their roots and rhizomes for plants, or through the touch and the emotional relationships for human beings. Plants that bring joy and life in the hospitals. Roots that grow and interlace, creating a real ecosystem. Lives that, even planted on concrete, are developing strong and unexpected unions.

Every time, the exit door of the botanical garden calls me back to me and I stop dreaming. Trajectories is on one side a thought on strangeness and the non-belonging and falseness of the world we’re living in and on the other side a reflection on our capacity to root ourselves so deep, to imagine ourselves in different realities, to create a ecosystem amazingly strong and surprisingly beautiful.