In her recent painting series Florilegical Narration, dedicated to rare and endangered plants, Ruth Mateus-Berr conceives of painting as an epistemic dispositif situated between ecofeminism, posthumanism, and debates surrounding the Anthropocene. The point of departure is an intensive scientific, mythological, symbolic, and historical-cultural research process—including endangered plant species in Italy—which is translated into complex, multilayered pictorial spaces. Botanical data, mythic narratives, religious and literary attributions, as well as historical contexts, overlap to form a dense associative network.
In dialogue with critiques of extractivist models of knowledge and economy, as articulated by Vandana Shiva, the works reflect on the reduction of biodiversity to a mere economic resource. Plants do not appear as decorative motifs, but as carriers of situated knowledge in the sense of Donna Haraway: embodied, relational forms of knowing that are constituted within ecological, historical, and cultural networks.
Furthermore, the paintings can be read in light of Stefano Mancuso’s research on the intelligence and sensitivity of plant life. Plants do not emerge as passive organisms, but as complex systems with their own capacities for perception and relation. From this perspective, the paintings destabilize anthropocentric hierarchies and stage plants as active subjects within a “more-than-human” network, in which interdependence and cooperation become visible as alternative models of coexistence. Through surreal displacements, mythological references, and symbolic condensations, nature appears simultaneously as a cultural construction and as an autonomous, agentive entity. Florilegical Narration can thus be understood as a visual archive of ecological vulnerability and resilience.
Mateus-Berr’s painterly practice moves between analytical inquiry and poetic speculation: painting becomes a space of aesthetic knowledge production in which ecological fragility, an ethics of care, and interdependent coexistence are negotiated visually.
