Lisa Waud | The Museum of Botanic Memory
Welcome to the future. We are in what might be a museum that will someday explain to people what the patios of Cordoba were and the relationship that the people there had with plants and flowers. This US artist wants to awaken our sense of gratitude towards what we have now through nostalgia: nostalgia as seen from the future. To do this, she is asking viewers to forget about their cell phones and the rush of life, and to try and contemplate something they think they know, because only by hushing the whirlwind we live in can we become aware of the natural world we are losing.
“The Museum of Botanic Memory is a multi-sensory multi-gallery installation set in the future and created to induce gratitude as a journey through nostalgia. artist lisa waud aims to invoke a sense of acknowledgment and appreciation for nature in our present lives through the consideration of botanic memories in the context of a future history.
Inspired by Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing and the idea of attention-holding architecture: “the artist creates a structure of attention-holding architecture that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.”
I offer The Museum of Botanic Memory as an interruption to these pressures, encouraging visitors to consider spaces in our everyday lives—for córdobans, the patio—that we can return to and hold open, as well as protect, as we move into a future of a threatened natural world”.
(Lisa Waud)
