Flor en un jardín de sueños * 2025
Sala de la Columna, Escuelas Mayores, University of Salamanca (Salmanca, Spain)
Flor en un jardín de sueños [Flower in a garden of dreams] is an interdisciplinary exhibition that reactivates the University of Salamanca’s 19th- and early-20th-century artificial botanical teaching models, including iconic clastic works by Louis Auzoux, not only as scientific instruments, but as sensorial heritage: objects that carry pedagogical memory, aesthetic force, and cultural time. Installed in the Sala de la Columna at the Historic Building of the Escuelas Mayores (University of Salamanca), the exhibition opened on 31 January 2025 and remained on view through spring 2025 (with an extended closing date in May).
Rejecting the neutrality of the traditional vitrine, the curatorial proposal builds an interpretive ecology where original models, archival and bibliographic traces, scientific illustration, and digital layers (including 3D-scanned representations and interactive media) coexist as a single, hybrid dramaturgy of knowledge. The visitor is invited to encounter botany not as distant information, but as a choreography of attention: a space where scientific rigor and poetic perception are allowed to overlap, contaminate, and deepen each other.
Within this framework, António Baía Reis served as Creative Director and Science Communication Lead, shaping the exhibition’s immersive media arts dimension through SciCommXR, his Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral project on arts-based science communication using immersive technologies. His central contribution was the conception and development of an immersive sound experience that turns the exhibition into a practice of listening: each botanical model is contextualized through 360º spatial audio captured in referential natural landscapes, interwoven with actor-performed narration that unfolds as situated storytelling rather than didactic explanation. Sound is treated as a curatorial instrument, not background atmosphere, but a cognitive and affective engine that shifts the visitor from passive observation to embodied sense-making, allowing the “mute” models to speak again through resonance.
Crucially, the project is grounded in reciprocal apprenticeship as method. The exhibition emerged from an intentional exchange of competencies and sensibilities: Reis immersed himself in botany over several weeks, learning to think from inside the collection’s scientific logics, while the botanists entered an intensive process of experimenting with XR and immersive arts, expanding their interpretive vocabulary beyond conventional museography. This bidirectional learning model became part of the exhibition’s ethics: knowledge is not transferred in one direction, but negotiated, through shared making, between disciplines that rarely inhabit the same room. In this sense, Flower in a Garden of Dreams proposes not only a renewed way to exhibit university heritage, but a scalable curatorial and pedagogical framework where collections become interfaces, and immersive media becomes a bridge between scholarship, public engagement, and contemporary art practice.
MEDIA:
https://botanicafisiologiavegetal.usal.es/exposicion-flor-en-un-jardin-de-suenos/