Adrien Missika

Botanical Frottage (Lauren)

Adrien Missika follows in the footsteps of the Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), a designer of gardens, parks, and promenades who introduced modern landscape architecture to Brazil. Marx’s work is characterized by the use of native tropical vegetation as a structural element of design. He worked with Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, the architects of Brazilia, and with them, the tropical plant became a motif in urban architecture. His garden in Guaratiba or the Copacabana mosaic walk in Rio are some of his well-known interventions.

Like the Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx who, sensitive to the temporal and ephemeral nature of architecture and civilizations, readily recycled architectural elements for his creations, Adrien Missika recovered the windows of a 60s Geneva building to be demolished and used them in a new context. On some of them, he placed images of palm, banana, and pineapple leaves, which the artist had scanned with a hand scanner, as a radical hyper-technological and manual way to record reality and bring back images from his travels. Using the 19th-century explorer and scientist figure, the leaf isn’t kept for a collection but recorded to become an architectural motif. Here, the window doesn’t offer a perspective on a landscape, but it only serves as memorabilia of what Nature was.