Exhibition 'An elephant in the garden', by Sylvie Bussières

Good to know

Curator

Mercè Alsina

Technique

Analogue black-and-white photography

Closing date

2026-10-22

What's it about

An elephant in the garden takes as its starting point an image from the Leopoldo Plasencia collection, held at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona, in which an elephant extends its trunk to reach peanuts offered by a woman. This unusual scene, loaded with poetic absurdity, inspires Sylvie Bussières to develop a project around floral elements that advocates for the contemplation of nature, moments of stillness and latent movement. Working with the photographic corpus that Plasencia produced for Barcelona's municipal parks and gardens between 1950 and 1970, the artist intervenes in the contours of the floral elements on her black-and-white analogue photographs, giving them depth and freeing them from their formal limits, transforming fixed images into dynamic forms. The new works thus connect past and present and evoke vulnerability, change and the unpredictability of nature. The exhibition forms part of the Panoràmic Arxius section of Festival Panoràmic, dedicated to the review and rereading of photographic archives as spaces of memory, interpretation and contemporary creation. Curated by Mercè Alsina, this proposal invites artists to investigate and develop new projects based on different photographic collections and archives, generating new narratives and perspectives on the past. Panoràmic Arxius thus opens a dialogue between document and imagination, between history and present, valuing the archive as a living territory in constant transformation.

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