curatorial projects.

Lexicon de Plantas:

Migration, Memory, and the Language of Nature

Curated by Sophie Bonet

The Frank C. Ortis Gallery

Pembroke Pines, FL

Feb 8-May 18, 2024

In Lexicon de Plantas, Venezuelan-born artist Alejandra Abad transforms the gallery into a multisensory habitat—a living archive of memory, flora, and language. This immersive installation, composed of drawings, collages, handmade materials, paintings, prints, and digital animations, traces the symbolic and ecological entanglements between the natural world and the migratory body. Through the fusion of analog and digital processes, Abad creates a lexicon—a symbolic vocabulary of plants—that speaks to the complexities of displacement, remembrance, and transformation.

Figure 1. Alejandra Abad, Lexicon de Plantas, 2024. Installation view at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.

The installation functions as a dynamic ecology in itself—each medium a layer of sensory knowledge. Drawings morph into animations, prints dissolve into moving color fields, and intimate textile pieces bloom into digital light. At the center of this metamorphosis is the act of remembering: botanical forms emerge from the artist’s childhood memories of Venezuelan gardens, herbal traditions, and the intuitive languages of care passed through generations. Abad’s process resonates with Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla—the in-between space where hybrid identities, geographies, and spiritual knowledges meet.¹ Through this liminal lens, the plants she recalls are not just visual motifs but mnemonic vessels, sites of belonging.

The digital animations evolve in real time, accompanied by a layered soundscape of ambient noise and spoken word—poems written and narrated by Abad’s grandmother. These intergenerational echoes weave voice and form, grounding the installation in matrilineal knowledge. The use of voice as both memory and material evokes Diana Taylor’s repertoire—ephemeral acts of embodied knowledge that resist erasure.² In this way, Lexicon de Plantas not only archives a cultural past but actively performs it.

Figure 2. Alejandra Abad, Lexicon de Plantas, 2024. Installation view (detail) at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery. Photo: Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.

Abad’s work moves beyond representation toward ecological intimacy. Handmade textures—cut paper, stitched surfaces, botanical patterns—mirror the nonlinearity of growth, decay, and regeneration. Here, plants are not background décor; they are co-narrators. The installation becomes what Donna Haraway might call a “sympoietic system,” where meaning is generated through collaborative and emergent relationships between species, memory, and medium.³ The visual language of the work reflects this logic: root systems, seed pods, and abstracted leaves stretch across wall and screen, suggesting that storytelling itself is a living, growing form.

In Lexicon de Plantas, migration is not rendered through maps or borders but through gestures of reinvention. As viewers move through the space, they participate in an unfolding ecology—one shaped by dislocation, care, and creative adaptation. The installation acts as a greenhouse of resilience: a place where ancestral memory, artistic experimentation, and the botanical world coalesce into a shared narrative of becoming.

Ultimately, Lexicon de Plantas is not simply an exhibition of nature-themed artworks—it is a living poetics of rootedness and flight. Abad invites us to consider plants not as passive symbols, but as kin, as witnesses, and as carriers of stories. The result is a deeply personal yet universally resonant meditation on how we remember, how we adapt, and how we grow.

Notes

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 100–103.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19.
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 33.

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.