Plant Fiction

Troika - Plant Fiction

  • 2012
  • C-type photographs and text
  • Currently on display

  • Location: Mathematics, second floor of the Science Museum

Climate Changing Stories is a series of interventions that reveals hidden stories behind some of the Museum’s best-loved exhibits, as well as showcasing artworks from established and emerging artists. It takes a long view of our climate changing world, offering a fresh take on historic inventions and everyday objects, and their impact on the world around us.

A creeper that sprawls across the city sensing airborne viruses; a weed that reclaims gold from disused computer circuits as it grows over landfills... Plant Fiction, by artist collective Troika, tells the stories of five fictional plants. Set in a near-future London, the imagined plants are genetically modified to improve the world around us.

Technological progress has afforded us a very comfortable standard of living. However, we rarely stop to consider the strain this places on the natural world and the future resources we rely on. We tend to see plants as a functional resource to feed, clothe or cure us.

Drawing inspiration from scientific principles found in mathematics and current biotechnology research, Troika play with myth and fiction to create a radical rethinking of our relationship with nature. Each of the stories provokes us to consider the sustainability of our current way of living, and the fantastical adaptations technology could potentially offer us.

About the artist

Troika is a London based studio founded by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel who are known for their experimental practise and projects that employ a cross-disciplinary approach and intersect between sculpture, architecture, and contemporary installation. They met while studying at the Royal College of Art and subsequently started their studio in 2003, emerging as an integrated practice that creates work collectively through detailed research, dialogue and experiment.

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