The Grafting Parlour's Parlour, Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2009
The Grafting Parlour's Parlour is a chamber for hybrid plant and human worlds. A collection of live and time-based samples drawn from the natural world offers the audience close-up encounters with the unfamiliar. Using both contemporary media technology and classical gardening techniques, plants and viewers are grafted together in a hybrid world of micro and macro perspectives.
The Grafting Parlour is a process-oriented collective of artists who integrate their methodologies for inquiry. Through cumulative research and playful experimentation, GfP devises communications models for interacting with living organisms.
A Growing Library
Visitors can examine the plants in the collection by moving the arm of the microscope. The Growing Library is presented in partnership with Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Laboratory of Forest Botany – Geobotany and with AVerMedia.
The chamber provides sounds from nature, with sound design and mixing by Jon Stevenson. The petri dishes show microscopic images of bacteria, on loan from Professor Eshel Ben Jacob, School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, with photography by Bareket Ben Yaakov.
The sensitive rainbow-generator operates by touch. By making a physical connection with the plant you animate the living sculpture. The mechanics were created in collaboration with the League of Imaginary Scientists.
The plant portal draws light from the opposite side of the globe, created in collaboration with artist Fang-Yu Lin.
The Parlour is lined with growing circuits, comprised of edible wheat grass grafted with small lights. As the wheat grass grows, circuits are randomly closed and the lights glow.
Additional contributing artists: Jon Stevenson; Fang-Yu Lin; The League of Imaginary Scientists
Contributing scientists: Natalie Kuldell and her Biological Engineering Laboratory at MIT; Finnish naturalist Panu Oulasvirta; Professor Eshel Ben Jacob, School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University
Images for "The Parlour" on loan by Professor Eshel Ben Jacob, School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University
Picture by Bareket Ben Yaakov, using bacteria Petri dish from Eshel Ben Jacob.
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