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EXHIBITION
Cy-fest, a new media festival
Yerevan Botanical Garden
Yerevan, Armenia
November 17 - December 1, 2024






This project is part of my long-term artistic research on the Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum)—a plant that has been demonized across Europe as a dangerous invasive species, despite its origins in the Caucasus and Armenia. In this project, I symbolically returned the plant to its native region—installing a site-specific work and two-channel video in the Botanical Garden of Yerevan, recontextualizing it not as a threat, but as a meaningful botanical presence worthy of attention and care.

For the first time, I presented the Hogweed coated in copper. Copper was not only an aesthetic or technical medium, but a symbolic one—a conductor of energy, memory, and conflict. Traditionally used in industry, circuitry, and ritual, copper became an interface between the natural and the technological, the living and the inert, the indigenous and the foreign. Enveloping the plant in copper was both an act of protection and transformation—enabling the plant to "speak" through a new material language.

The exhibition took place inside the greenhouse of a botanical garden—an institutional space that preserves “valuable” species while excluding “unwanted” ones. The Hogweed, considered a threat elsewhere, was here at home. The installation raised a core question: who decides which species are worthy of care, and which must be erased? By examining the materials, language, and power structures that shape definitions of invasiveness, the project asked us to rethink the boundaries between belonging and exclusion.

The project also questioned the very concept of invasiveness as a cultural and political construct. What if invasiveness is not a threat, but a signal of shifting ecological relations? What if plants we label as intruders are in fact actors within a new planetary paradigm?

Through a combination of film and installation, the work reimagines our relationship with so-called non-native species—not as problems to be eradicated, but as living entities that can teach us about resilience, transformation, and coexistence. The aesthetics and science woven into the work form an invitation to cultivate empathy, curiosity, and imaginative thinking—urging us to replace fear with care in our engagement with the more-than-human world.

This piece is not only an ecological reflection but also a political gesture—a call to reshape relational structures in a world where nature is not a mere resource or object of control, but a full participant in dialogue.