Flora neocomensis
Within the Enquête Neuchâteloise, Olga Cafiero creates a sensitive inventory of the canton’s flora, engaging in a dialogue with its botanical history. Her images reveal the fragility of ordinary flowers, far from the idealised perfection of art history or botanical illustration. Some species are invasive, their spread suffocating others; Cafiero echoes this through images saturated with information, where reading becomes blurred, as if overtaken by visual colonisation. Other flowers have vanished since the eighteenth century, traces of which remain in the Ivernois manuscript herbarium, reproduced here in soft greys. Using a scanning electron microscope, she also unveils forms unimaginable in Rousseau’s time, whose writings inspire her “promenades.” Between rephotographed herbarium pages and contemporary fieldwork, Cafiero reflects on what endures, disappears or re-emerges in the landscape.
