Farangis Yegane: florae Obscurae, visit page
a florae Obscurae, by Farangis Yegane, 1996
The subject of ‘florae Obscurae’ is flowers – though, not in their relation to the culture of ornament or decoration, not as metaphorical entities like for example as vehicles of some unattributable malevolent purposes of fate, like in Baudelaire’s poetical thought-image of the “fleurs du mal”, and they are not taken in terms of their biological botanical classes.
Here instead flowers are visually described as universally and terrestrially contextual-existences, i.e. having own environmental contexts in which we can see them as “floral-sentient” plants.
A new environmental phenomenology is sought to be etched out, the type of natural occurrence that normally gets packed into the complex but one-way idea of “animism” as pantheistic frill. The florae Obsurae are images of a plant world that speaks in a language which is not a floral taxonomy nor a stylist’s taste for a flower bouquet. These flowers are spiky by making up a different habitat (‘nature’).
Plants get categorized in terms of their aesthetics and utility,
animals are defined in terms of cognizance and sense,
and humans, finally, are understood as the civilizatory geniuses of their social and political world which constitutes a beginning and an end in itself.
By a shift in view this cycle is being broken or gains further dimensions.