TO THE RESCUE – An architecture of restoration
by Mireille Schellhorn
portfolio special mention call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2022', 2022
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
In my photographic work I deal with the perception of plants in human culture based on my research into the People-Plant Relationship. I explore the interaction of human culture with plant life as a metaphor for the human condition. TO THE RESCUE – An architecture of restoration – depicts plants with supporting aids in an urban environment in the United States. I discovered my passion for taking care and healing plants in various places e.g. Houston TX, Miami FL, Phoenix AZ, Santa Barbara CA. In this photo series, architectural elements appear as types of structural support for plants, providing shelter from intense weather conditions, as well as heat and strong winds. In civilization there are buildings like churches, which provide support and a kind of spiritual shelter. The triangular shape of roofs, defined by A-frame architecture, could be interpreted as visual metaphors of care and compassion.
Review by URBANAUTICA
The garden is also synonymous with care and compassion. Mirelle Schellhorn returns to the topic with a series of photographs that illustrate different plant restoration interventions. These images, collected in several places in the US, speak of a common will to safeguard and protect plants, of a benevolent feeling whose border expands to the world. However, these images also tell us of a special complicity. Of friendship, in a way. Can we be friends with a plant? Are we sure that only plants benefit from this relationship? These green devices, these crutches, also inject moral aid for those who apply them. Taking care of a plant is a possibility to take care of ourselves. A further consideration concerns the context of these photographs. We are primarily in urban environments, and these plants appear to us, first of all, solitary. They perform a "vegetable (or green) entertainment" function, inserted in a context that is certainly not theirs. Therefore, between the lines of this investigation, a metaphor of human culture as said by the author, we can also glimpse a space for rethinking our settlements and our way of life, which sometimes appears alien to the world. What if the plants took care of us? What if they define the parameters on which to structure our habitats? What if their health was the thermometer of our well-being? What if we learned to design places rich in biodiversity as forests? We are very far from imagining all this.