An Elephant in the Garden. Sylvie Bussières

An Elephant in the Garden takes as its starting point an image from the Leopoldo Plasencia collection, held at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona, showing an elephant stretching out its trunk to reach the peanuts offered to it by a woman. This unusual scene, charged with a poetic sense of absurdity, inspires Sylvie Bussières to develop a project centred on floral elements that celebrates the contemplation of nature, moments of stillness and latent movement.

Bussières works with the photographic corpus Plasencia created for Barcelona’s municipal parks and gardens between 1950 and 1970, a meticulous record of the rich plant life found in these urban spaces. Working over his analogue black-and-white photographs, the artist reworks the contours of the floral elements, giving them depth and freeing them from their formal boundaries, transforming still images into dynamic forms. The resulting works thus connect past and present, evoking the vulnerability, change and unpredictability of nature.

Panoràmic Arxius.
With the collaboration of Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.