Cyfest – International Media Art Festival
Yerevan Botanical Garden, Yerevan, Armenia
November 17 – December 1, 2024


This project is part of a long-term artistic research on Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), a plant widely demonized across Europe as a dangerous invasive species despite its origins in the Caucasus region. Presented at Cyfest in the Botanical Garden of Yerevan, the work symbolically returns the plant to its native landscape. Through a site-specific installation and a two-channel video, Giant Hogweed is recontextualized not as a biological threat but as a botanical presence deserving attention, reflection, and care.

At the center of the installation are life-size Hogweed plants coated with copper. The material operates both aesthetically and symbolically: historically associated with industry, circuitry, and ritual, copper acts as a conductive interface between natural and technological systems, between living matter and industrial culture. Enveloping the plant in copper becomes an act of transformation and protection, allowing the plant to reappear through a new material language.

Installed inside the greenhouse of the botanical garden, an institutional space dedicated to preserving “valuable” species while excluding others, this work highlights the power structures embedded in botanical classification. In the Caucasus region, where the plant originates, Giant Hogweed appears less as an alien threat than as part of a shared ecological history. The installation therefore raises a central question: who decides which species deserve protection and which must be eradicated?

The project examines invasiveness as both an ecological and cultural construct. Through film and sculptural intervention, the project frames non-native species not merely as “problems to be eliminated”, but considers them as indicators of shifting planetary conditions and new ecological relationships. By combining artistic research, scientific discourse, and speculative imagination, the project invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between belonging and exclusion, proposing a more relational understanding of coexistence in a rapidly transforming environment.