La Pensée Sauvage: Adrien Missika

Far from a frictionless ideal of filiation, the wild pansy offers a parable of uncomfortable kinship. It is a story of making do with decisions made by others, and of accommodating interlopers and replacements. It speaks of the challenges of being a good host and a good guest. The little flower holds different ways of working within the constraints of structure–and potential for poststructural transgression. Indeed the wildness that the pansy shares with thought lies with its propensity for queer overflowing of the relations prescribed by a marriage that is not convenient to all who are united within its embrace.

Troubled kinship relations are the legacy of the era known variously as the Anthropocene, Plantationocene and Capitalocene. Like the paternal pistil of the pansy around which the stepfamily gathers, a copy of Le Capitalocène by Armel Campagne (2017) is enshrined at the core of Adrien Missika’s video TransPlants (2024). Enclosed in a bird cage along with a mandarin orange, incense, shards of a broken mirror, a dead dragonfly and other symbolic items, the book becomes a talisman that accompanies the artist on a treacherous journey across the city of Guangzhou. On the flatbed of a motorized tricycle, he transports a collection of large tropical plants from the flower market to the garden of an art gallery, where he waters them lovingly. In turn, he hands over custody of the plants under a legal contract for their care and replanting in open soil. In this ambiguous gesture of landscaping or rewilding, the transplants become botanical step-family, and as such, figures for the broader urban ecosystems into which they intervene.