Ephemeral Spaces: Crafting Nature’s Transience: August 2025 Boisbuchet, France

I recently spent a week in Lessac, France immersed in flowers, grasses, soils, weeds, reeds, seeds, fruits, leaves and stalks creating and crafting with ephemeral landscapes under the guidance of renowned florists and designers Frida Kim and Wagner Kreusch.

Through experimental plant based sculpture and set pieces I explored my critical interests around what we choose to conserve and preserve; what is cherished and discarded; how nature is ossified in the image..and the ethics of it all.

Together we chopped 100 bamboos from the forest, stripped them from their leaves and laced them with hundreds of white paper moons. These were tied to chairs and became the table dressing for a spectacular dinner in front of Boisbuchet Castle.

In my piece “Fugitive” August 2025, guests were invited to come closer to investigate a plain white paper sculpture. Aperture slits allowed people to peek at fragments of the full flower arrangement concealed inside but never experience the full piece. It was inspired by Eduard Glissant’s notion of a “right to opacity” and Moten & Harney’s work on fugitive knowledges in a culture where in the West our experience of flowers is often about distributing a curated image rather than closely attending to the blooms themselves. This loss of reverence is reinforced by dominant science which suppresses the mystery and magic of flowers by turning them into mechanical and technical objects of study - assuming everything will and is in the power of science to eventually know.

The workshop/residency was hosted in Domaine de Boisbuchet, an international research center for design and architecture in southwest France.