Floral Resistance
“[A] rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein in 1913. But what about when a rose is not only a rose?
Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?, the 28th edition of Ljubljana’s Biennial of Design, offers one suggestion. Curated by educator and author Alexandra Midal, supported by assistant curator Emma Pflieger, the biennial opened in Slovenia’s capital in late 2024. Spread across the city, the biennale sought to explore the political complexity of design through the lens of flowers and steganography, the practice of concealing a message within an object, image or text. As opposed to the more familiar field of cryptography, which seeks to encrypt information through the use of a code, steganography is a method of communication that leaves no clue to an impartial observer that there is a message to be uncovered. Across its various exhibitions and projects, Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? highlighted historical and contemporary projects in which flowers have been used to convey hidden information.
Flowers combined with steganography makes for an unusual design theme, particularly in comparison to past iterations of the biennial, which have focused on more familiar terrain such as vernacular design, communal knowledge and non-urban spaces. To Midal, however, the theme’s entanglement with secrecy, obscurement and layered meanings provides a way to access and facilitate questions around the political impact and potential of design. When messages are concealed or hidden, she argues, it opens up questions around who in society is able to speak (and what they are able to say), as well as reflections on what design strategies might exist to combat the entrenched power structures that stifle, censor and restrict.
Across the biennial, Midal and Pflieger have explored historical topics and practitioners such as the Serpentine Dances of artists Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) and Alice Guy (1873-1968), in which billowing skirts were formed into floral shapes, playing with symbolism and stereotypes surrounding women and flowers in movements such as art nouveau, while also requiring intimate – and concealed – coordination between choreography, lighting design and stagecraft. These links to historical practice filter through an assortment of 20th-century projects, including Ray Eames’s design for Herman Miller’s Certificates of Authenticity, which employ an image of wildflowers to encrypt the information they contain, as well as contemporary projects such as Sub Rosa by Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma, a project documenting roses in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan – a response to state surveillance and censorship experienced by Piotrowska while photographing the region.
Perhaps the core exhibit of the show, however, is the herbarium of Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist thinker and co-founder of the anti-war Spartacus League in Germany, who was ultimately tortured and executed by the German Freikorps in 1919 following the Spartacist uprising that sought to establish a soviet republic. Prior to her death, and during her imprisonment between 1915 to 1918, Luxemburg had produced 17 notebooks that contained a detailed herbarium, and she regularly corresponded with friends regarding botany. Today, however, many scholars believe that the flowers in Luxemburg’s notebook may have provided a way through which she could clandestinely communicate with her secretary Matylda Jacob – an as yet undeciphered cryptology that allowed Luxemburg to design a system for leading the Spartacus League from her cell.
This revelation, along with those associated with other exhibits in the biennale, are revealed in the final room of the central Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower? exhibition at Ljubljana’s MAO museum – a curatorial strategy on Midal’s part to create a “twist” and engender a sense of narrative in the project. “I want to have a surprise at the end,” Midal explains, “and I want that sense that something is happening in terms of a storyline.” In the interview that follows, which has been edited for length and clarity, Midal expands on her motivations for exploring design through the lens of flowers and steganography, arguing for an understanding of the field that encompasses cunning, deception and resistance.
Disegno Where did the idea behind the biennale come from, because it has something of a split theme: on the one hand it’s about flowers, on the other it’s about steganography. Those two ideas relate to one another, but there’s also an interesting diversion between them.
Alexandra Midal I’ve never been asked that question before, which is interesting because it's very personal. In general, there are two things that interest me when it comes to my job as a design curator. One is that I really want to embrace complexity and I don’t want to simplify things. I think that is extremely important, especially in a world in turmoil. We need to embrace complexity. The other thing is that I want to create, if possible, exhibitions in which there is a storyline and not just a series of works placed next to each other – I want a narrative. But the specific questions of this biennial came from the fact that I’m obsessed with questions of secrecy, hidden messages and resistance. I’m drawn to complexity because I’ve always defended the idea that design is about politics. There is a political essence to design, which is not at all what the modernist doxa of honesty and functionality have taught us. I want to embrace complexity and the political issues that are, for me, very much intertwined with what design is about. So that's why the biennial contains this idea of secrecy. I’m not comfortable with trying to simplify.
“I really want to embrace complexity and I don’t want to simplify things. I think that is extremely important, especially in a world in turmoil. We need to embrace complexity. ”
Disegno Which is funny, because many of the dominant narratives that have swirled around design are, at heart, solutionist. There is this idea – even if it isn’t what actually happens – that the field is trying to provide solutions to simplify life. Your theme seems to explicitly take aim at those narratives.
Alexandra When I started my PhD at Princeton, everyone who talked to me about design had a different take on what it was about. But when I looked at the kind of discourse that designers raised, it was always about making things simple, effective, direct. I don’t buy that, personally. When I was entering the world of design, I decided to meet all the big maestri and I remember meeting Andrea Branzi for an interview in his office. He had plenty of books around him, and I knew he was writing, so I asked him a question about those books. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Oh, I never read.” But the guy was surrounded by books, so it very clearly showed me that what people say doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what they do. There’s a simplification within design – not of the works themselves, but of the message. That is exactly the kind of space that interests me, and which puzzles me, because I like to think that I'm working as an investigator. You have to scratch beneath the surface, otherwise nothing interesting comes out.
Disegno How do you interpret your work as a curator? Because, on the one hand, you’re speaking about exposing the complexity and messiness within the field, and working as an investigator, but on the other hand you might have another curator saying that they feel their chief task is to clarify or explicate to a public.
Alexandra It’s true that many people, for very good reasons, want to clarify things for an audience. That makes complete sense, and when I write I really try my best to create very clear essays that can be read and understood. I don’t oppose complexity to clarification, I just oppose complexity to simplification. I don't disagree with people who are working on clarification and I hope that I’m also working on that, even if sometimes I don’t succeed – I’m working on the clarification of complexity, because I believe that’s what the world is about. When I’m talking about complexity, there’s no contempt for an audience. On the contrary, I’m very interested in people following an exhibition and being a part of it, which is what the biennial was dealing with.
Disegno So, to achieve that, why theme the biennale around both flowers and steganography? Because you could have executed the kind of show you’re talking about with either of these themes on their own.
Alexandra I’m very interested in finding case studies for my work, and this relationship between flowers and steganography actually came from a discussion I had with the artist Thomas Demand. He told me that he would have loved to do a show with big posters around a city showing flowers. If I recall correctly, he had read that politicians in South Korea, and figures in government, had historically presented themselves in the public sphere using photographs or paintings of flowers. I thought that was fantastic, but I was also puzzled by it. What's the interest in being portrayed by flowers? But then I realised that if someone died, they could repeat that same image for their successor, which might be useful politically. It's a kind of 1984, where you may not change events as they happen, but you do change the way that they appear. I thought that was interesting and it became the starting point of the project: what is the most seemingly banal, naive form that we don't question? Flowers seem to me to be absolutely interesting because they can look so mundane, but on the other hand there is so much complexity there. I come from a background in literature, so I know how important the relationship between women and flowers has been, for instance – think of Baudelaire and The Flowers of Evil. So I had this idea of flowers as having a secret agenda, but when I started working on it I had no idea that this could be linked to the question of steganography. And then I found out about Rosa Luxemburg.
“If we go back to the question of solutionism, many people try to find hope in saying that designers can provide solutions to problems. I’m maybe less optimistic about that, but perhaps not by much, because what I’m trying to say is that there are always strategies of resistance.”
Disegno If you were going to try and sum up the show in one exhibit, it would probably be Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium. There is an idea of concealment, a graphic identity, a political agenda, and the secrecy in the fact that they haven’t been successfully decoded.
Alexandra When I found out that scholars have been working on the steganography in her herbarium, it was incredible. When she was in prison, there was no possibility of her giving and sharing ideas about how to run the Spartacus League or how to share information, so it was instrumental for her to use the decoy of the flower in order to process political action. I found that mind blowing. When I found out what she had done, I knew I had the project, which I could then expand to other aspects of design. But this idea is not only historical, because if you look at Sub Rosa, the collaboration between Formafantasma and artist Joanna Piotrowska, you can see that these questions are still alive today.
Disegno Could you expand on that?
Alexandra Joanna was traveling in a contested region when she was arrested by the police, who were very worried because she was photographing things. She was interrogated, and later let go, but she realised that given the surveillance she was then under, the only thing she could do would be to photograph the roses in the region. I was amazed to see how Formafantasma then framed that work in relation to the political space of an interrogation room [a series of “anti-frame” stainless steel framing devices, which contain Piotrowska’s images of roses within structural elements and materials found in interrogation rooms, ed.]. I thought it was really interesting how she navigated that experience through roses, and it shows how this really is a show dealing with contemporary issues. Censorship exists, it has always existed, and it's becoming all pervasive. If we go back to the question of solutionism, many people try to find hope in saying that designers can provide solutions to problems. I’m maybe less optimistic about that, but perhaps not by much, because what I'm trying to say is that there are always strategies of resistance. The philosopher Vilèm Flusser explained that the word “design” has a lot to do with cunning [see ‘On the Word Design: An Etymological Essay’, ed.] – I think it’s important to remember there are many ways of giving or sharing a sense of hope.
Introduction Oli Stratford
Photographs Lucija Rosc for MAO
Oli Stratford served as a BIO28 Advisory Board member.
The Biennial of Design in Ljubljana is organised by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in cooperation with Centre for Creativity (CzK).