Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Walking alone through Union Square I am carrying flowers and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts...There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. It was a circular, sloping patch of ground...Baby Kochamma turned it into a lush maze of dwarf hedges, rocks and gargoyles. The flower she loved the most was the anthurium. Closer to the house, vibrant bushes of hibiscus reached out and touched one another as if they were exchanging their petals. A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. The flowers grew to a height of about two metres, their slender stems, like rods of glass, bearing a dozen leaves, the once transparent fronds frosted by the fossilised veins...As the flowers swayed slightly in the evening air, they glowed like flame-tipped spears. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper, I could hear them breathe. But, look, the flowers you nearly brought have lasted all this while. I can buy myself flowers.¹

Admittedly, the author of this overview loves flowers and, more so, loves literature. The overview in question, for the 28th edition of BIO Ljubljana, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?, on view from November 21, 2024 – April 6, 2025, mines this very relationship, bringing forth a garden of flowers, virtual, on the page and sculptural, that give us clues to emotions or convey messages through a cryptic language of their own. The above is but a small snippet: from the bouquets and gardens of Prince Edward Island to the symbolic flowers of Margaret Fuller to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers to Andy Warhol’s Flowers series, the appropriation of flowers by LGBTQIA+ communities through history; revolutions named after carnations (1974) and tulips (2005) and the flower power movement—flowers really are everywhere, and not only in literature as literary devices to signify deeper meaning.

Perhaps exactly because of their ability to symbolise emotions and even messages, the curators of the design biennale, Alexandra Midal and Emma Pflieger, attempt to speak their duplicitous language to bring forth new stories of culture and society through design. The 'doublespeak' of flowers in the sense of the use of flower imagery to indicate sexuality or the idea of a woman or the notion of the gentle, delicate and impermanent, transcribed onto the doublespeak of design and the arts form the crux of the biennale, marking 60 years since its first edition.

In fact, the monologic opening above is inspired by a one-way conversation the assistant curator for the design exhibition had with Miley Cyrus on Instagram that is presented in their press release, an indication of the many entanglements the curators hope to play on with the showcase. Bringing together designers, artists, filmmakers and thinkers, the biennale presents an invitation to dwell on themes of "feminism, secrecy, and resistance through the lens of floriography," not limiting itself to novel productions of design. As the official release mentions, the showcases "transcends the traditional exhibition format, serving as a multi-faceted proclamation that engages with the past and present and intertwines design, art, and cinema."

To be a flower is profound responsibility
- Bloom, Emily Dickinson

It's vital here to emphasise the many layers the showcase is trying to navigate through something as quotidian as the image of a flower. As Midal notes in an interview on the biennale's website, "Flowers are one of the most common topics one comes across in regard to anti-capitalism and ecology within art and design, [yet] it is frequently omitted that behind the recurrent androcentric metonymy between a woman and a flower, and the commodification of women, feminists have invented a great number of secret languages within flowers to act and resist." The magnification of the intertwined perspectives of the woman and flower and their allusions to sexuality or fragility are subverted through this feminist lens in each project or artwork that is displayed in Midal’s careful curation, underscoring the doubled speech she employs for the show.

Distinct from design fairs that focus on the product of design, BIO28 insists on personal interpretation and plot to drive the visitor’s navigation of the displayed works, replete with "surprise and discoveries", as Midal mentions in the interview. With encrypted messages and evidence denoted by flowers in the exhibition space, the curation creates an intimate dialogue between visitors and work that feels novel in format. For instance, entering the main exhibition that is hosted at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana, a visitor is confronted with a floral sculpture by the Czech painter Anna Zemánková. This sculptural design speaks, welcoming one and denoting the stakes for what is about to ensue. It is through this guidance that one can explore the artefacts, finding new links between different designs, much like a mystery story or adventure in which designs act like a ‘McGuffin’.

Each section non-exhaustively details different associations flowers have been subjects of throughout history. In MAO, a major section of the showcase unravels Carl Linnaeus’ conception of the woman-flower. Homonymously titled, the section reveals how the establishment of Linnaeus’ system of classification resulted in the proliferation of a hyper-sexualised metonymy between female genitalia and flowers based on the botanist’s observations of plant reproductive organs. To highlight this, to revise the narrative through other works, the exhibition showcases models of flowers that were produced in the 19th century by the German company Brendel for educational purposes.

This would discursively influence the arts, with the depiction of women alongside sinuous flowers in art nouveau paintings and designs. Further, posters, graphic designs and films further bring to light forgotten histories of women involved in the arts and their association with flowers, as Midal emphasises the need to understand these stories apart from the dominant narratives attributed to the relationship of women and floriography. For instance, an installation features videos of the dancer Loïe Fuller, who revolutionised the history of dance with her signature Serpentine Dance that included floral imagery. The inclusion of fields that are not strictly design highlights the shifting boundaries between disciplines and the expansion of design, which is a way of thinking.

Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't
- Lady Macbeth (Act I Sc. V), Macbeth

In a similar vein, to create a secret visual system to be used as a certification of authenticity for the furniture firm Hermann Miller, Ray and Charles Eames requested to be sent a book of flowers from the gardens in Zeeland, Michigan, where the Herman Miller headquarters are located. Ray Eames then asked her husband to photograph the bouquet, turning the image into a trademarked symbol. Using flowers and meanings attributed to them as a sign of political critique, Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga’s monumental seven-metre carpet is also part of the displayed works. The carpet features the baobab flower, which, placed alongside Belgian designer Victor Horta’s art nouveau works, silently critiques Belgium’s colonisation of the Congo, because of which certain plants and flowers were taken to Europe; then becoming prominent motifs in Belgian Art Nouveau.

These underlying issues, cryptically conveyed through the pretty images of flowers, are then revealed to visitors in the last room of the exhibition titled Hidden in Plain Sight. “The last room shows how such a mundane topic as a flower – such an everyday part of life, need not stop at a discussion of sustainability. In fact, the biggest secrets and the most interesting things lie hidden in everyday life, rather than in the extraordinary,” Midal reiterates. The aim of the show, then, is not to reproduce the self-same, self-aggrandizing narratives about sustainability or design practice that most such biennales inadvertently recycle. Instead, the showcase asks its viewers to imagine the stories behind design only to reveal that the dominant patriarchal lineage we have so far been taught is false.

In addition to the exhibition, BIO28’s programming includes talks, workshops and city-wide events in the design museum as well as at ISIS Gallery and Mala Galerija Banke Slovenije in Ljubljana. Five projects were specially commissioned for the biennale as a way to propagate the multifaceted discourse engendered through the exhibition and to spotlight the vital role collaborations play in design production. These platforms add to the design event’s multifaceted discourse and emphasise the role of collaboration. The various themes of the design biennale—a focus on secrecy, politics of resistance and feminism—also come together variously through collaborations or production platforms. The biennale includes five such specific collaborations.

The first, Beeswax Studio and Grotto, is devised by XenoScapers Collective under the mentorship of French industrial designer Matali Crasset. The project by design collective employs beeswax and digital projections in astonishing combinations to explore the grotesque qualities of matter. Underscoring the biennale’s astute focus on the language of resistance, (Un)woven tales by Anna Odulińska & Nika Van Berkel, mentored by French-Carribean designers Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach, is an art installation that juxtaposes Slovenia's lace heritage with stories of individuals who were rendered stateless by the establishment of Slovenia as a sovereign state in 1991. The third platform is an experimental film by El Último Grito that blends documentary and fiction, I’ll be Poppy, while the fourth,Murmuring Orchids by Prostorož, mentored by visual artist Polonca Lovšin, features an installation that uses orchids as a stand-in for women in precarious housing situations. The last platform, Cattleya - Don't Teach a Flower How to Bloom by YASA Collective, under the mentorship of Grashina Gabelmann and Michelle Phillips, is a web-based platform that deciphers and unravels floral metaphors and stereotypes in popular culture by providing resources and reading material to engage with queer and feminist critical theory.

In the past year, STIR has covered a few biennales whose programming went beyond the mainstream concerns of novelty or innovation. These provided new lenses to consider contemporary issues such as resource parity and the climate crisis. While as a news publication, both of these formats hold their own relevance to the progression of design discourse, BIO28 proposes a wholly new, exciting way to think about design. Instead of concerning itself with the grand design of the world and the designer’s role in such, by focusing on the minute and particular, it brings to light the many entanglements of our presuppositions that colour how design is experienced and how design colours our experience. It is within this doublespeak, after all, that novelty might flourish.

References:

1. ¹Quotes in order of appearance: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; June by Alex Dimitrov; Hamlet by William Shakespeare; God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; I wander'd lonely as a cloud by William Wordsworth; The Garden of Time by JG Ballard; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; Tulips by Sylvia Plath; Flowers by Wendy Cope; Flowers by Miley Cyrus

'Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?' is on view from November 21, 2024 – April 6, 2025, at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana.