Ce que disent les plantes Grenier à Sel, Avignon
Ce que disent les plantes (What Plants Tell Us) marked the first chapter of Symptoms of the Living (2023–2025), an exhibition cycle developed by Le Grenier à sel around changing relationships between humans, technology, and the living world. Bringing contemporary artworks into dialogue with historical herbariums, the exhibition explored the ways in which plants are observed, celebrated, preserved, and reinvented.
At a time of accelerating climate change, profound transformations in agriculture, and the emergence of increasingly virtual and artificial forms of nature, What Plants Tell Us asked what plants can teach us—and how artists might help us reconsider our relationship with them.
The exhibition brought together artistic perspectives on the vegetal world that ranged from celebrations of beauty and life to reflections on biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems. Moving beyond a historically anthropocentric understanding of nature, the works invited visitors to enter a non-human world and reconnect with the complexity and agency of living systems.
Nearly twenty works unfolded around three intertwined themes—celebrating, preserving, and recreating—through a wide range of media including drawing, video projection, film, sculpture, algorithmic painting, generative and interactive installation, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
Spanning more than a century of approaches to observing and representing plants, from nineteenth-century scientific herbariums to the digital collections and datasets assembled by contemporary artists, the exhibition examined how technology transforms both our perception of nature and our capacity to imagine new forms of life.
aurèce vettier
Donatien Aubert
Karl Blossfeldt
Betty Bui
Miguel Chevalier
Thierry Cohen
Jean Comandon
Valère Costes
Jean-Henri Fabre
Jérémy Griffaud
Fabrice Hyber
Benjamin Just
Laurent Pernot
Sabrina Ratté
Max Reichmann
