In her first solo show with Zina Gallery, Thea Lazăr recreates an aesthetic  of encyclopaedic plant collections, drawing much of the exhibition’s  thematic language from Joseph Arnold’s work The Kunstkammer of  the Dimpfels, a Family of Ironmongers and Traders from Regensburg  (1668), which portrays a cabinet of curiosities— the early ancestor of  the modern museum, a space with preserved specimens, automata  and remarcabilia, presented by collectors as a microcosm of the world.  The video-work A Dying Leaf Should Be Able to Carry the Weight of the  World (2023) serves as a discrete guide through the Botanical Garden  and Botanical Museum in Cluj-Napoca, becoming the foundation for  Thea’s exhibition. She creates her own cabinet of curiosities, a space  suspended into an introspective territory, where fossils, textiles, and  botanical specimens are subjectively indexed and preserved. 

Artificially fossilized Ginkgo biloba leaves stand as relics of timeless  places where past and present seem to fold into each other, disrupting  the conventional notion of linear history. Seeing her textile embroidered  series, depicting the endangered white lotus, Nymphaea lotus var.  thermalis, or the mysterious rebel Dracula orchids and Stapelia  gigantea, I felt that each piece narrated a tale of survival and adaptation.  But when Thea told me about the plant Aerel dobrogean, a recently  discovered plant in Dumbrăveni Reservation, something touched me,  like a complete gesture toward a newly crafted feeling. Now I have to  carry the story of a plant that was unknown to science until recently.  How should I do this?  

Maybe the story of the Aerel dobrogean makes me realize there are many  other unknown plants out there and that’s… hopeful. The same feeling  I had when I learnt from her about a the nearly immortal plant that has  been living for over 2,000 years. For Thea, a cabinet of curiosities is more  than just a collection of oddities; it’s an invitation to explore shared  emotion through a particular selection of objects that are telling stories  about the world for a while. These objects, who are not meant to assign  a fixed identity to their collectors, or a rigid perspective of the world,  open themselves to multiple interpretations, stories, and contexts. 

The stories can create a ‘we’, a collective charade, a loose assembly  characterized by shared belonging, suffering, and potential. This  encounter acknowledges the diverse experiences of hardship that the  climate crisis brings, and can foster connections to our world despite  the acquired baggage of threat and horror. As theorist Karen Barad  explains the non-hierarchical nature of entanglement, entities maintain  their connections even when dispersed, implying that our actions hold  real meaning due to a predetermined capacity resulting from unseen  connections. 

Text by Daniela Custrin