Botanical island | living-lab

Botanical island is a site-specific intervention conceived on the limits of Wollemi National Park, in the UNESCO`s World Heritage listed Greater Blue Mountains. An exceptional area of Australia characterized for its fragile biodiversity, with a wide range of natural habitats and endemic plants. 

The intervention scopes and delimits a fragment of a pristine forest as a living laboratory traced by a low-impact path that links botany, senses and mind-ecologies. Along the path, people perceive different atmospheres, from scenic scale to detailed level, experiencing the complexity of this ecosystem and the dynamics of its bio-interactions. 

Cartography of senses: The project proposes a multilayered approach, through a conductive thread that weaves different cartographies: textures, scents, sounds and scenes. 

Vegetation process: The project has been conceived as a series of ephemeral interventions -tracing, mapping, plant identification and community walk-, emphasizing the natural process of vegetation, and encouraging nature to continue with its own spontaneous growth, by erasing the trace left by human activity and performing over again its own dynamics

Research-lab & dissemination: With the intention of increasing the landscape awareness, the project applies interdisciplinary methods of site-approaching and didactic processes. The intervention was complemented with the Research-lab, a parallel exhibition space for knowledge, participation and dissemination where the experiential site work is displayed: sensory maps, drawings, cartographies, videos, sound recordings, sketches, photographs, models, as well as the interactive herbarium.

Interactive Herbarium: With the aim to collect, identify and disseminate the different species that shape the -Botanical Island- , the herbarium is displayed as a framework in which the local community can participate and interact, sharing their own knowledge about the plants identified in the site -uses, applications, relationships, cultural meanings or personal stories-. Among the flora living in this forest fragment are several varieties of eucalyptus and angophoras, associated with a variety of cedars, acacias, turpentines, ferns, grasses, mosses, shrubs and wildflowers.