« A series of photographs of miniature flowers floating on seaweed in Saint George's Lake in central Copenhagen, taken with a Carl Zeiss 35mm lens, framed by a sustained reading of Salomon Thomas Nicolai Drejer's 1838 Danish botanical atlas of the same name. Drejer, who died at twenty-nine of nicotine poisoning, edited a section of Flora Danica in 1841–42; his Flora Excursoria is a field-guide of plant species growing in and around Copenhagen, with the Latin Linnaean names paralleled by Danish folk names. »

« The Drejer first edition was acquired from Herman H.J. Lynge & Søn — Copenhagen's oldest antiquarian bookseller, founded 1821. The provenance is specific. A Copenhagen artist buys a Copenhagen flora from Copenhagen's oldest book dealer about local flowers, herbs and plants. The localism is dense; it is also a quiet claim about chronotope as practice rather than theory. »

--

« And then by diagrams (another mathematical metaphor, or more precisely, at least a geometrical metaphor, but this time garnished with a flower, in order to present the field of a meta-metaphorics):

If the present work could be retained as a basis for a physics or a chemistry of reverie, as the outline of a method for determining the objective conditions of reverie, it should offer new instruments for an objective literary criticism in the most precise sense of the term. »


Bachelard translated by . A. C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press), pp. 109-10, quoted from 'White Mythology - The Flowers or Rhetoric', Margins of Philosophy, 1972.

Source: Flora Excursoria Hafniensis by contemporary Danish Artist Kasper Bergholt.

Pentax K5 & Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2.
Back to the front page