BIO28 Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?

The Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) and the Centre for Creativity (CzK) proudly present the 28th edition of BIO Ljubljana, one of the world’s oldest design biennials, celebrating 60 years since the first exhibition. Curated by Alexandra Midal, BIO28 Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? brings together global designers, artists, and thinkers to explore the relationship between art, design, and the coded language of flowers. This edition reflects on themes of feminism, secrecy, and resistance through floriography. Alongside the exhibition and five production platforms, BIO28 includes talks, workshops, and city-wide events, with highlights at ISIS Gallery and Mala Galerija in Ljubljana.

Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? exhibition
Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? is not merely an exhibition but also a multi-faceted manifesto that operates through back-and-forths between the present and the past, as well as between art, design and cinema. It is dedicated to the science of secrecy and, more specifically, to the coded language of flowers—or floriography—in the service of feminism. During the Victorian era, the popularity of floriography gave flowers the power of symbolic communication of morals and feelings. In opposition to modern cryptology—full of machines and decoding—the secret language of flowers demands listening.

The fragile and charming floral motifs and their metonymy of the woman-flower also form a relationship with the natural sciences, which constrain women to a decorative role. The same motifs also use guile and deceit to transmit information. Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? explores how the arts have embraced this double language in the fight for societal changes. Just as media philosopher Vilém Flusser defines design as “the founding intention of all culture, of all civilization” and does not hesitate to call the designer a “cunning plotter laying his traps”, floriography proposes a form of resistance that hides behind the seemingly neutralized and seductive banality of floral language. Combining aesthetics and feminism, flowers take on the role of a double agents: like spies, they work to both provide and conceal information to better serve interests and deceive enemies. 

The exhibition examines how the floriographic ruse manifests itself in works by Margaret Watts Hughes and Loïe Fuller, or in Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium, with which—from prison—she led the revolutionary Marxist group Spartacus League. It shows how it manifests in the photographs of forget-me-nots projected by Ray and Charles Eames to undermine American government propaganda in Moscow. We also see it in the disguising of political and military leaders’ identities with the names of Middle Eastern flora—a language established by Fadwa Hassoun—or in the elixir created specifically for this exhibition by Marguerite Humeau.

BIO28 production platform
BIO28 Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? features a production platform developed with the Centre for Creativity, showcasing interdisciplinary teams mentored by renowned creatives. These teams explore the coded language of flowers and their connection to marginalized groups.

Beeswax Studio and Grotto by XenoScapers Collective mentored by matali crasset, merges beeswax with digital projections to explore the grotesque qualities of matter in a wax-based hyperspace. (Un)wowen tales, mentored by Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach, juxtaposes Slovenia’s lace heritage with the erasure of stateless individuals in 1991, challenging ideas of nationality and belonging. I’ll be Poppy by El Ultimo Grito is an experimental film blending documentary and fiction. A documentary movie by OSM films reflects on BIO’s 60-year evolution and its creative processes with the help of Maja Šuštaršič. Movement for Public Speech by Prostorož mentored by Polonca Lovšin, presents Murmuring Orchids, an installation using orchids as metaphors for women in precarious housing. Cattleya by YASA Collective, mentored by Grashina Gabelmann and Michelle Phillips, reclaims the floral metaphor in Don’t Teach a Flower How to Bloom. Through posters and a web platform, the project deconstructs femininity stereotypes, revealing the resilience of flowers and women.

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