Flora Incognita

Born in Rio de Janeiro and based in Geneva, Leticia Maciel has developed a curatorial practice shaped by movement between cultures. Since founding Espace_L in 2011, she has cultivated a space for artistic exchange between Brazil and Europe, bringing together contemporary practices from different cultural contexts. Over the past fifteen years, the gallery has become a place where diverse artistic voices meet, challenge one another, and generate new forms of dialogue.

The title Flora Incognita evokes the unknown or yet-to-be-classified plant world. Here, it becomes a metaphor for artistic practices that resist fixed categories and invite new ways of seeing. The exhibition embraces the idea of the Wild Garden as a space where diversity grows freely, without rigid order or predetermined hierarchies, and it reflects Leticia Maciel’s curatorial vision and the philosophy that has shaped Espace_L since its foundation. Like such a garden, it develops through proximity rather than taxonomy. Diversity is not illustrated; it is cultivated.

Ceramics forms a central thread within the exhibition. In the works of Heberth Sobral, Vasilis Zografos and David Elia, clay becomes a material of memory and transformation. Shaped by earth and fire, it echoes the exhibition’s reflection on encounter, migration and continual reinvention. Alongside his ceramic works, Elia’s cyanotypes investigate botanical archives and historical systems of classification, while Vivianne van Singer explores the transformative qualities of colour and perception, and Marius Margot imagines speculative vegetal ecologies where nature and fiction converge, resonating with the exhibition’s idea of Flora Incognita, a vegetal world that remains open, mutable and continually reinvented through fiction.