Located in Basel, Foundation Beyeler hosted an exhibition by Olafur Eliasson, creating an artificial landscape inside and around the museum. The installed plants are based on the natural ecology around the art space. The installation includes sounds of insects and the smell of plants and water. 

I briefly searched works in bio-art including plants, not to inform my project, but to be aware of the possibilities in this field. Several artists work with plants and bacteria, such as Roman Kirscher who constructed a self-forming plant sculpture in an aquarium, deriving from a Persian myth about a bush that sprouts heads. Another work with similar technology is Andy Gracie's semi-synthetic ecosystem which monitors the evolutionary adaptation of natural organisms, using artificial bacteria.

Lauren Berkowitz collects natural and recycled objects for her installations which reflects her sculptural methodologies of collecting, arranging, and repetition focusing on sustainability and landscape history. The artworks consist of post-consumer waste. The gallery space has been temporarily transformed into a greenhouse, including many edible plants or ones with medicinal properties. Though the right conditions are provided, plants are still in demand of the artist’s presence and continual care. There is also a group of artists and designers named Futurefarmers working together since 1995. They host projects challenging political and environmental systems.

My search on bio-art also expands into Suzanne Anker’s writings on themes of artificiality, nature, and their representations in art. As Anker states;

Human reproduction regularly occurs in Petri dishes while cucumbers are grown in space. The artificial and the natural now combine to form novel entities, never before seen on earth, while animal species dwindle down to extinction every day. Animals and plants are exhibited as contemporary art, while the real is conflated with the imaginary.

This brief search helped me to see various approaches in forming an artificial ecology and how I could question notions of territory, waste, and the organic through imaginary species of plants.