Incidents of soft care 

“I have tried to touch all of me with all of you. To be synchronized. A tactile matter of touching is not mandatory as we already contain each other within our bodies and we can not be separated without one’s death. With the oxygen that you produce, your extremities are infinite, as you are in my mother, my sister and in me. You are all around, unseen, like a God. While my lungs absorb the oxygen you provide, what do I give you in exchange? My, exhale. I bring to you what I used and no longer need. And you take it and give it back when you finish consuming my breath.

All of me is here and now; but all of you are everywhere, dead, alive or waiting. You have a myriad of aggregation forms… paper, charcoal, chair, clothes, food, medicine… How can I compete with you and even know all of you when you already, with my own will, have me through my breath?

Your plantainess does not come from a staged process of evolution but rather from the way you keep me alive without ever running out of yourself. There is enough of you but too much of me. I feel too much of a human when looking upon how unnecessary complicated my being is”.

In the “Incidents of soft care” exhibition, the artist Alexandra Boaru presents a series of analog photographs, objects and an in situ installation (to be created during the opening event), which has as its central theme the hybridization between plants and female hair, used as a metaphor and as substance for a process necessary for transcendence between different species. Both by its structure and by its functions, hair is a living organ, which arises from a germ. Cells multiply, germs develop, taking the shape of a hollow sphere inside. Inside the plant cell, however, there are numerous organelles, which perform various functions necessary for the survival of the plant.

Along the lines of speculative philosophy, which we find in the entire work of Alexandra Boaru, a hybridization of this type – in which the plant cell becomes the germ for the hair follicle – is not only a personal statement, but a neo-alchemical process absolutely necessary for the artistic experiment with which she operates. However absurd this hypothesis may seem, it is, in fact, only a natural consequence of returning to the concept of nature (be it human or non-human), in which the central theme is the relationship between man and the environment, in a moment marked by a fragile balance between forces (social, political, environmental, etc.). It responds, at the same time, to the obsessive “clivage” also formulated by the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour: “Nature/Culture”, in a sensitive and conceptual manner.

Nature, viewed as a non-social objective reality, is conceptualized, passed through the filter of one's own artistic experience, internalized and reconstructed in a new, antagonistic vision that contradicts the limiting paradigms of the “man vs. the nature”. The hybridization process is fluid and integrative, we can say that Alexandra “collaborates” with the plants to develop, “together” a new pattern of “being in the world”. Where modernity uses classification and categorization, post-modernity looks for new methods of “unlearning” them, a way to cancel categories and class distance, to identify common features – plants as active agents of the environment, which respond and communicate with stimuli around them – touch, light.

Cancelling the paradigm of the human being located at the center of the world, and using similarities, it is more than obvious why the artist chose female hair for this symbiotic hair-plant relationship. And, just as obviously, why her entire oeuvre explores and operates under the auspices of a deeply imaginative experiment oriented toward symbiosis, hybridization, and infinite possibilities of (meta)transformation. (Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți, curator)