Kunst Herbarium

©Alberto Baraya, "Herbario de plantas artificiales", 2001-2008

Der Kolumbianische Künstler Alberto Baraya sammelt seit 2001 in seinem "Herbarium künstlicher Pflanzen" Blumen aus Plastik-, Stoff- oder Papier. "In his ‘Herbario de plantas artificiales’ (Herbarium of Artificial Plants, 2001–ongoing) he parodies and questions the empirical objectivity of a botanical naturalist. ... As Baraya has stated: ‘By picking up some plastic flowers on the street, I behave like the scientists that Western education expects us to become. By changing the goals of this simple task I resist this “destiny”. In that moment all assumptions are put into question, even History.’ The first leg of this ongoing project involved the classification of all the specimens in a sort of absurd taxonomy in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Chinese encyclopaedia’. " Den ganzen Frieze Atikel