Mystical creatures

Mystical Creatures is an intervention in the space of a botanical garden, where plant species from the Himalayas, Japan, China, the Far East, Central Asia and Siberia coexist. The diversity of forms, structures and plant environments turns the site into a natural setting for an imaginary world inhabited by mystical beings.

The installation uses cut-out plaques placed within the vegetation as traces of unknown organisms or as guardians of the space. Their forms simultaneously evoke natural and fantastical imagery, as if merging with the environment and remaining partially hidden among the trees and the rare botanical species. The intervention explores the boundary between the real and the imaginary, drawing attention to the botanical garden itself — a place that brings together plant species from different geographical and climatic zones.
Mystical Creatures invites the viewer to observe attentively and to discover new connections between nature, myth and human imagination.

The project explores connections as unstable and processual structures that emerge through movement, perception and interaction. The installation is positioned in the context of spatial practices. At the same time, the work can also be thought through the lens of Nicolas Bourillot’s relational aesthetics, as it does not exist as a finished object, but as a field of possible connections activated by the viewer. The cut forms function as absences that do not represent images, but create conditions for their emergence. In this sense, they approach the understanding of space as an active field in which absence is as significant as presence.

Mystical creatures are not fixed forms, but temporary coincidences between point of view, body, and environment. They arise as an effect of connections — fragile, unstable and dependent on the observer’s position. The work exists not as an object, but as a state that changes with each pass.