REYKJAVÍK BOTANIC GARDEN. 2025

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Unruly—An archival book-project that documents gestures of removal, misplacement, and quiet transformation of 7 plants within urban nature. Developed through months of research within the Reykjavík Botanic Garden, the work investigates how plants—like people—move, adapt, and become entangled in cultural, ecological, and bureaucratic systems. Drawing on archival omissions, scientific misnamings, and the quiet logic of roots and rhizomes, the project presents a fragmented archive of species that are present yet unacknowledged, missing yet remembered, or appearing under false names. It is an unruly archive—one that refuses to stay within the systems or spaces built to contain it.

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Focusing on the shifting presence of plants—those that have migrated, been relocated, misidentified, or exist outside the archive—Unruly becomes a study in movement: of roots, of records, of meaning. It explores the layered registers of disappearance, not as erasure but as a form of unstable continuity, where absence is dense with material and memory.

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Drawing on methodologies of fieldwork, fiction, and ecological thought, the work engages institutional systems —asking how value is assigned, how belonging is determined, and what quiet forms of resistance might emerge through the overlooked. It is both an act of care and a refusal: care for what slips through systems of knowledge, and refusal to accept fixed definitions of presence, origin, or worth.

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Rather than offering a cohesive narrative, Unruly is structured as a fragmented, unstable archive. The project plays at the edge of documentation, slipping between official language and imagined taxonomy, between remembered names and those that never held. What results is not a record, but—a dispersed, bodily archive of movement and misalignment, where the past does not sit still, and the present is always in translation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​