notations on passion flowers, maracujás and the soothing desires,… of possessing or letting it go. Article published in Bucher Trantow, K., Hribernik, A. & Mele, M. (eds.),(2026) Bloom – A Transdisciplinary Exploration of Flowers , Bielefeld: transcript Verlag
Cool Tropics is a poetic-critical essay following the passionflower across personal memory, botanical histories, colonial expeditions, medicinal knowledge, migration, and contemporary horticultural markets. Moving between Rio de Janeiro and Graz, Maracujá and Passiflora, it weaves autobiography and historical critique with humour, grief, speculation, and plant agency, asking what histories and forms of knowledge disappear as plants are renamed, classified, displaced, and commodified. Ultimately, the colonial archive becomes a speculative space of restitution: the dissected and collected Passiflora reappears not simply as a botanical specimen, but as an ancestral, resistant presence capable of unsettling the histories through which it was captured and classified.
image: Snow start /Black Atlantic. Reinterpretation of Lubera’s plant label
