7 1/8 x 5 1/8 in
Edition of 10
This exhibition grows from a pressing question: what might plants teach us about living together in a world on fire?
It gathers two long-term photographic projects rooted in sites of environmental violence—zones of anthropogenic fire, contamination, and ongoing transformation—where industrial and nuclear histories entangle with disrupted ecosystems and precarious life-worlds. From Chernobyl Herbarium, created with flora from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to Flowers of Fire, formed among the charred and contaminated earth of the Terra dei Fuochi in southern Italy, I follow plants as guides, learning from the ways they make worlds even amid the ruins.
Both projects emerge from a collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder, exploring ways of attuning to plants through the image-making process in which the plants themselves act as agents of their own inscription. Rather than adopting a distant or extractive gaze, I turn to the least toxic processes possible, allowing each photograph to reveal itself with the plant together with the elements that host it. Thus, in an entanglement of light, matter, and decay, the plant’s living presence transforms the image into a site of encounter—a space to learn and to cohabit, nurturing new collaborations across species and histories.
Photography becomes an act of listening, a practice of staying with, of noticing what persists and what asks to be seen differently. This approach is cultivated as a practice of regard, a gaze that in French also carries the sense of égard—a care inscribed into the act of looking itself. To see, then, is not only to observe but to hold space for what presents itself. In this sense, the plants of both projects do not merely appear before the lens; they present themselves—and perhaps regard us in turn.
Chernobyl Herbarium 2011 – ongoing
Rayograms of plants from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
On Saturday, April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a.m. local time, a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant took a disastrous turn. The core of reactor No. 4 exploded, emitting a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that drifted across the then Western Soviet Union and Europe.
This project is made up of one rayogram per year since the explosion, created by the direct imprint of specimens from a radioactive herbarium on photosensitive plates. These plants grew in the soils of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, studied by the team of biogeneticist Martin Hajduch, who analyzes the impacts of radioactivity on flora.
As in other projects, I draw on the fragility of photography’s beginnings, especially contact photography. In the Chernobyl Herbarium, the images are realized by means of a traditional rayogram process, yet the cesium-137 and strontium-90, which innervate the plant, also contribute to the creation of its imprint on the photosensitive plate. These radioactive rayograms are therefore kept in a lead box stored in the basement of a laboratory.
Material traces of an invisible disaster, these images are captured at the edge of the visible. Alongside them, 39 fragments of texts by philosopher Michael Marder invite reflection, interpretation, and symbolization—taking stock of the consciousness the accident fragmented and, perhaps, cultivating another, more environmentally attuned way of living.
Flowers of Fire 2024–25
Photographic correspondence on paper and fabric collected in the Terra dei Fuochi
Interweaving photography and ecology, botany and philosophy, this project is developed in companionship with ruderal plants in extreme soils of the Anthropocene: the Terra dei Fuochi and the volcanic area of Vesuvius, in the Naples region.
Cultivated during an artist’s residency at Spot Home Gallery, Naples, under the guidance of scientists and inhabitants of the land, Fiori di Fuoco takes the form of a correspondence between myself, the philosopher Michael Marder, and communities of plants which—in Roman times—cured people before the eruption of Vesuvius, and today participate in the healing of soils marked by the incineration and burial of toxic waste in the depths of the Terra dei Fuochi.
According to certain botanists, ruderal plants overproduce a molecule known as phenol when growing in heavily polluted soil. Via the photographic process, I collect this excess of phenol using a method known as phytography. Without extracting the plants from their soil, I rely on sunlight to expose their bodies, and on a natural chemical reaction between the phenolic molecules and the photosensitive surface—paper or textile gathered from landfills and sensitized to light. Reviving the ritual of poet and herbalist Emily Dickinson—who enclosed dried plants in her correspondence, or sometimes included her poems in flower arrangements—I send these other-than-human writings to Michael Marder, who responds with a series of letters addressed to each plant. After receiving the letters, I return to the plant to read aloud the philosopher’s words, while collecting a new phytography of the plant.
From leaf to leaf, through words and images, these gestures unfold in the sense of the medieval etymology of the term correspondence: “to harmonize with,” “to enter into a relation with.” In this way, philosopher and photographer open spaces for encounters with plants at the margins, forgotten by our ecological unconscious. In a landfill turned into an open-air photographic laboratory, we weave intimate bonds with these expressions of ecological vitality, growing in the ruins of capitalism.
Fleurs de feux (Flowers of Fire). Le témoignage des cendres was developed during a residency hosted by Spot Home Gallery, Naples. It is a laureate of the French Institute’s MIRA program (Mobilité Internationale de Recherche Artistique) and the Prix Photographie & Sciences initiated by Résidence 1+2, the French Ministry of Culture, Adagp, CNRS, Stimultania (associated venue), and Picto Foundation, with media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche
BIOGRAPHY
Anaïs Tondeur (b. 1985) lives and works in Paris.
Attentive to the invisible materialities of air and climate, plants and soil, Anaïs Tondeur develops photographic investigations as anthropological tools. She captures images at the interstices of bodies and environments, in sites marked by human activity, where she nurtures novel engagements, pointing to alternative forms of relationality and photographic materiality.
Her practice, anchored in early analogue photographic techniques, unfolds as a composition between time, chemistry, and ecological ethics. Working through sustainable processes, she considers the image as a sensitive membrane—one that listens, receives, and makes perceptible the presence of beings that elude conventional visibility. Here, the photograph ceases to be a representation; it becomes a passage, through which entities otherwise invisibilised might speak or resist..