Documenta 17 (2032) project
The Floraissance is a vision of society reconnected with nature—where flowers can bloom in all springs to come. It marks a shift in how art relates to time. No longer guided by the zeitgeist (the spirit of the present), art becomes rooted in a zukunftsgeist—the spirit of the future. This is the essence of the Floraissance. This is more than a movement; it’s a transformation. Art is no longer just about responding to the now—it’s about cultivating what’s next. The Floraissance invites artists to become art-gardeners, and museums to evolve into living vivariums of creative growth.
As part of this shift, we’re gathering visual and theoretical evidence that contemporary art has already begun its transformation into the Floraissance. This collective project will culminate in a magazine, shared as a seed on June 12, 2027, the opening day of Documenta 16. Please note: this is an independent effort, not officially affiliated with the Documenta organization.
We invite artists, critics, curators, historians—anyone curious about this emerging era—to contribute. Help us document the Floraissance. Please subscribe if you want to receive montlhy updates:
Starter: The idea of Floraissance is based on this book.
Proposal abstract: How to demonstrate that contemporary art has passed and the Floraissance has begun? This proposal will have three parts:
1- Gather texts with definitions of contemporary art from different authors and create an updated version of them, so we can have an unified perspective of contemporary art. Also collect images of artworks that represent this view.
2- Gather cultural evidence that the Floraissance is already happening, such as art exhibitions, books, artworks ideas, etc. and create a living vivarium.
3- Compare the updated definition of contemporary art to the Floraissance evidence collected, and write final considerations. What is the Floraissance?
All this material will be organized as a magazine that can help other people to understand the shift from contemporary art to the Floraissance.
How to particiapte:
- Uplaod texts and books with contemporary art definitons.
- Upload evidence of the Floraissance.
- Help resuming books, writing texts, and being more active with the thinking/editing of this project.
To upload materials / get in touch HERE.
Final considerations:
Thank you! Everyone involved will be added to this proposal magazine. Even if your text or effort is not visible in this final document, it was certainly an important part of the process and will be added as part of a non-hierarchical list of contributors.
One Good Example of a Floraissance Artwork
(Page 50 of the Floraissance book.)
(...)
“However, how do we evaluate an work that is not contemporary art any more? How do we evaluate art with a long-term mentality? Instead of considering the artwork according to its past or present, how do we evaluate it according to its future?“
(...)
“I will present a case study, keeping in mind that art could need decades to sprout and become alive in the collective culture. When that happens, art ceases to be an “artist’s” creation and begins to belong to everyone else. In this same moment, the artist becomes an art-gardener: the work is not original because it cannot be copied, but it is original because it has originated a cultural transformation. An artwork that was created as contemporary art by an artist can sprout, with the passage of time, as Floraissance art! The shift from ‘contemporary art” to “what comes next” it is not a rupture, but rather a continuation.
The best example of this kind of shift is Lygia Pape’s (1927–2004) work “Divisor” from 1968. In this work, several women walk with only their heads emerging from a giant white fabric, creating a single block of connected people. For decades, this work was exhibited and performed as contemporary art at innumerable art institutions, such as the São Paulo Bienal, the Tate Modern in London, and MoMA in New York, among others. But it was only in 2018 that the work hatched from its intellectualized ground of the art institution and sprouted as a collective project: a group of women in São Paulo used Pape’s ideas to stage a protest with hundreds of people in favor of women’s rights on the city’s main avenue, changing the color of the fabric from white to red, and giving cultural life to a dormant idea.
At the same time that the artist becomes an art-gardener, the contemporary becomes the Floraissance, the museum becomes a vivarium!”
(...)
How do we know if art is alive or dying?
We know when a plant is more alive or if it’s dying in our living room: if the leaves are green and hydrated, the plant is well; but if the leaves are dried and brown in the summer, something is wrong. The principals for evaluating Art under the Floraissance follow a similar path: how can we know if art is alive or if it’s dying? If Floraissance art only will become art in the future, only if it sprouts with the passage of time as a collective incorporation, the Floraissance criticism group should think which art has the potential to sprout in the long-term (not only in the contemporary when it was created). So, to evaluate the potential of an work of art to be alive in the long-term we can use signs as:
| + Alive +/- Potential - Deficient |
We also prepared some suggested fields of thoughts as:
|