Artist Olga Kisseleva, Head of International Art & Science Institute and Professor of contemporary art in the Sorbonne University, will talk about EDEN (Ethics-Durability-Ecology-Nature), a project she has been developing in her laboratory since 2016.

EDEN represents an artistic utopia assuming that extinction, despite its supposedly definitive and irreversible characteristics, can be revoked thanks to the advancement of contemporary human civilization. The project takes the experience and the information from the scientific research and transforms it into an artistic proposal allowing humans to fully comprehend the experience of plants. The resulting artwork constitutes the ultimate expression of scientific exploration by the translation of data into an experience which humans can immerse themselves into, and understand what the trees communicate with their environment.

In Israel Olga Kisseleva conducted the project EDEN on disappeared and endangered native species from the Negev area in collaboration with CNRS, Arava Institute and the Bar Ilan University Archeobotanical Laboratory. Her exhibition Listening to Trees across the Jordan River presents this research in the Negev Museum of Art since December 19 2019.

Image: Ancestrofuturismo, 2018 Guarana, copaiba, andiroba, cipo miraruira and cipo unha de gato, Amazonian endangered plants, Brazil. Photo: Olga Kisseleva