Flor de Placebo is a photo-poetic project developed in April 2020 by the Lara Crespo and Manuel Delgado, during the quarantine period.
Through a minimalist digital composition of floral photos and free-verse poems in Spanish, the project aims to create natural comforting cognitive spaces. To that end, each photo-poetic collage depicts a flower and a poem. The flower represents an extract of nature and the poem represents an extract of society. Each element is therefore a visual semantic proposition.
By aligning flowers and verses, an extract of the newly compound proposition arises: “natural society”. This cognitive representation paves the way for psychologically comforting the spectator, because it serves as a visual placebo pill.
This placebo-based process grounds the cartography of solitude during the 2020 pandemic, because it helps to overcome confinement but, at the same time, does not offer a long-standing solution.
Flor de Placebo boosts the synthesis of serotonin in our brains by facilitating the communal connection with nature without external action. It plays with previously interiorised references about one’s location during lockdown.
Finally, the disposition of poems and flowers represents natural formations, such as caves, rivers or mountains, using void spaces as connecting angles, and so aligning human feelings with aspirational natural elements.
In that sense, Flor de Placebo presents a delusional mapping of the current state of mind of isolated people during the COVID-19 crises. It criticises specialist approaches that do not encompass socialization methods.
Natural connection, as a basis for the proposition “natural society”, is another important pill for the healing process of our generation, but it is not included in “nowadays’ treatment.”
For most policymakers, natural connection is only a “placebo”, and so we present it here.
The placebo maps.
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