Killing the Flowers Won’t Delay Spring

The joint exhibition by Martin Nytra and Iva Davidová is driven by their shared passion and sensitivity toward plants as sentient beings, as well as by their engagement in both guerrilla and traditional gardening practices. In their exhibition at Pragovka, the artists focus on the interconnection between plants and architecture—the theme of biophilic design, which is also addressed within the field of architecture itself. However, rather than presenting proposals for real buildings aligned with contemporary architectural trends, Iva Davidová and Martin Nytra approach the subject through a poetic, fairy-tale-like visual language. In it, they combine the aesthetics of animated stories with the realities of the environmental crisis we are currently facing. Their models of houses—adapted from dollhouses—are overgrown with “weedy,” yet medicinal plants, such as dandelion. For Davidová and Nytra, houses and cities are understood as potential biotopes, a perspective that the discipline of architecture itself should begin to embrace.