At the root of 36 Potplants lie 36 original artworks by Wysocka / Pogo. Each original piece is composed from two separate Risograph prints of pot plants: the prints are made on canvas, then cut apart and hand-stitched together. The source material for these prints comes from a modest booklet titled “Topfpflanzen 1,” published in 1977 by ZBE – Berlin Flowers.

There is, perhaps, a grammar to life that no organism escapes. Each being, from the smallest spore to the grandest mammal, carries within itself a syntax — a structure of reaction and resistance. The world, then, becomes a text of affinities and aversions, written not in words but in molecules. When sunlight strikes a leaf, or pheromones cross a room, there is no dialogue, yet there is meaning. One might say that all living things read each other chemically. They decipher: too much salt, too much light, too much proximity. The plant withers beside another not because it hates, but because its alphabet collides. The body of one utters what the other cannot digest. In this way, coexistence is not harmony but translation. Sometimes we translate well — roots intertwine, species align, ecosystems balance on an invisible syntax. And sometimes the translation fails — a misreading of light, a misunderstanding of air, and what once grew together turns toxic. Barthes might have said that love and aversion are the same semiotic act — both are readings of the other. To “hate” is to acknowledge the other’s grammar but to refuse its resonance. To “love” is to dissolve boundaries until meanings blur. Thus, the garden and the body share a secret: they are both texts of negotiation. Every organism is a reader and a sentence simultaneously — rewriting itself in reaction to heat, pressure, and proximity. The soil, the cell, the skin: each a paragraph in the endless discourse of being.