Floraissance, The Art Movement You Probably Haven’t Heard of (Yet)

By Amelia Wood

“The contemporary has passed. The Floraissance has begun.”

These words are painted on pieces of plywood nailed to walls, hung on fences, and leaned against scaffolding all across the city. Maybe you’ve seen them. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, it’s worth paying attention, because this is the start of a new movement in the art world y’all, and it’s pretty groovy.

It’s called the Floraissance and its pioneer is a young artist named André Feliciano. Born in 1984 in São Paulo, Brazil, he has been involved in art and photography since 2001 when, as a high school student, he began developing a philosophy for an artistic perspective that would stay with him for years.

Now, he calls himself an art gardener rather than an “artist” and has had his work featured in Time magazine’s photography blog, the blog of the International Center of Photography, and has exhibited his work at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Photoville in New York, and the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York. His work in the past has featured artificial flowers which from a distant look like vibrant, lush gardens but which up close are revealed to be tiny cameras made of a resin-based material.

Strange and beautiful… but there’s much more to it. The idea behind the Floraissance, in fact, stems from the observation that Contemporary is no longer a word that can describe art. So, in May of 2006, Feliciano decided to take action.

“The idea was simple,” he told NYU Local, “if the Contemporary is a period of time, it will never end. But if the Contemporary is a person, someday he will have to die.” Going along with this idea, Feliciano hosted a party with around 300 guests to celebrate the hypothetical birthday of this personification of the Contemporary. The idea wasn’t to kill the Contemporary but rather to usher him into another year of life. As we all change in every year that we age, once the Contemporary got older, he would cease to be and the Floraissance, according to Feliciano, would be allowed to flourish.

So, what does it mean to Feliciano to be a Floraissance art-gardener? Well, as he told NYU Local, it’s all about education.

“If I teach somebody how to sing a song,” he said, “this person can teacher others, who can teach others, making this song alive in the culture. The life of art-nature is related to how much a work of art incorporates an educational process.” So, he began to realize that in order to make Floraissance part of a culture rather than just an abstract idea, it must be a collective project.

He has since formed such a collective and invited several people to write about the Floraissance in their own field of study. These fields include healing, law, and love. The point is to make art do something, teach something, become a vehicle for social change. Making artificial flowers wasn’t about proving a point that nature is dead. According to Feliciano, it was about showing us that, on the contrary, nature is alive in humanity, and about bringing to life a dying contemporary culture.

The project is growing fast. Soon, we may all be art gardeners.

To check out more of Feliciano’s work, check out his website here.

[Image via Andre Feliciano]