Diana Lelonek’s herbarium is fundamentally distinct from its historical precedents. It is not a collection of dried specimens but, rather, a report on the effects of human activity on certain species of plants. Lelonek has conducted research in landfills and postindustrial slag heaps on sites that may seem minimally conducive to floral life. She is fascinated by the capacity of certain plant species to adapt to new, unnatural, and often entirely synthetic soil matrices and to create hybrid wasteplants. Lelonek’s work calls attention to transformations in the natural world provoked by human activity in the age of the Anthropocene, now that humankind’s supremacy over nature has begun to undermine the very basis of the Homo sapiens species and that of planet Earth as a whole. In this light, Lelonek’s herbarium is a watershed event, for hers is likely the first herbarium of a new era in which these de-humanized hybrid forms will incrementally gain precedence over the flora we have thus far deemed “natural.”
Marek Wasilewski
