This joint exhibition by Martin Nytra and Iva Davidová is inspired by their shared passion and feeling for plants as sentient beings, as well as by their guerrilla and traditional gardening practices. The exhibition theme centers around the interconnection between plants and architecture as the topic of biophilic design is explored within the field of architecture as well. However, Iva Davidová and Martin Nytra do not present designs for real buildings with forms corresponding to current architectural trends. They do it via a poetic, fairy-tale-like visual language within which they intertwine the aesthetics of animated fairy tales with the issue of our real current environmental crisis. Their house models (adapted from dollhouses) are overgrown with “weedy” yet medicinal plants. Davidová and Nytra view houses and cities as potential biotopes; a concept which the discipline of architecture itself should also consider.

In the common imagination of building users as well as architects, the prevailing image is that of a building constructed to provide shelter for people. Any natural elements, such as green roofs or facades, are perceived primarily for their cooling function rather than for the purpose of expanding habitats for other animals in the urban ecosystem. Thinking about designing buildings and urban spaces for non-human actors remains the exception—yet, at a time of drastic biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, cities and their built environment represent lifelines for many organisms; and it is the duty of both architects and urban planners to take this fact into account.

Plants within a space not neglected by officials or property owners must meet certain aesthetic criteria in order to have a right to exist there. They have to be shorter rather than taller; if tall, they have to be planted only at regular intervals and mixed with shorter plants, because otherwise they appear as if they have colonized the space; and that is problematic from the authorities’ perspective. If a given space is to appear wild and natural, it has to be segregated from other forms of spontaneity: artificially created or encouraged wildness is tolerated in enclosed, privileged spaces (seats of economic and symbolic capital—museums, courtyards of luxury homes or at least new developments, promenades like New York’s High Line)—or in places closer to nature, such as riverbanks or postindustrial sites being converted into parks.

Dandelions, shepherd’s purse, and dogwood, mostly abundant within cities, have medicinal properties and serve as a food source for bees, hoverflies, bumblebees, and blackbirds. In the works of Iva Davidová and Martin Nytra, these plants become part of the facades of “reconstructed” little houses, and although they are made of inanimate material, we do not perceive them as facade ornamentation on historic architecture, but as a representation of a living, non-human body finding its way and living in symbiosis with human structures. Their aesthetic is far removed from that of contemporary experimental biophilic architecture. Yet, it offers us a captivating visual form evoking magic and mystery, as well as the radical nature of dreaming—how we could reimagine our coexistence with living creatures and plants in a much more loving way.

— Barbora Lungová