Post by Daniel Blochwitz

Day 26 | Continuing my efforts to bring you a daily photograph that is meant to transport this home-bound audience elsewhere, I would like to present today the image "Jardim No. 9" (2014) by the Berlin-based Brazilian artist ©Luzia Simons (http://luziasimons.de). Using a scanner as her "camera", Simons arranges typical European houseplants into scenes that suggest their wild origins of the rainforests in South America. In her work, she explores the way culture is transferred, transported or appropriated - how we often fail to recognize what is native and what is cultivated, or confuse what is original and what is simulation. Simons' stylized images in the series "Jardim" seem to allude to Henri Rousseau's "naïve" paintings of jungle scenes, even though the former Parisian toll collector had never left France. It is the consequent follow up to her preceeding body of work, "Humboldt ist niemals da gewesen" (2013), in which Luzia Simons returns with her own images from the Brazilian Amazon, a region the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt had never been allowed to visit (because of his open sympathies for the French revolutionaries). These links and cross references make Simons' beautiful floral arrangements so rich and stimulating.