Public Program

Lecture by Alexandra Midal

Chiara Camoni’s exhibition I fiori del male at Società delle Api is accompanied by a Public Program articulated through three events, conceived to explore and expand upon the themes of the exhibition from different perspectives, bringing artistic practices, research, materiality and forms of collective imagination into dialogue.

The first event, Blooming Voices: Can You Speak Flowers?, is a lecture by professor and curator Alexandra Midal. Since the emergence of floriography as a codified language of flowers at the turn of the 20th century, flowers, bouquets, and ribbons have been deciphered as an elaborate code through which emotions can be expressed indirectly. Yet beyond a floral language of tenderness, friendship, and love, the association between femininity, flowers, and floral ornament also reveals what the British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere famously described in 1929 as “womanliness as masquerade.”

The association between women and flowers, and more specifically the woman-flower analogy, which reworks the figure of the femme cafetière, has given rise to forms of camouflage and playful mise-en-scène as if suggesting that flowers could indeed speak.

From this perspective, Alexandra Midal will propose the hypothesis that women artists have often appropriated, played with, and distorted the supposedly neutralized vocabulary of female floral symbolism in order to conceal forms of secret communication behind visual simulacra. Through a series of case studies – including the herbarium of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) and her Lily dance, and the work of Fadwa Hassoun – she will explore the ways in which flowers can become vehicles for coded, political, and emancipatory forms of speech.

Ultimately, drawing on Miley Cyrus’s now-famous pop refrain, the lecture will explore the cultural and political significance of women “buying themselves flowers” as an act of self-determination and of reclaiming a symbolic language traditionally associated with femininity.

Following the lecture, Circo Tornio, the performative project by Chiara Camoni and her collaborators from Il Centro di Sperimentazione, will be activated. The public will be invited to work simultaneously at the pottery wheel, in a collective process that transforms the practice of ceramics into a shared experience.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Alexandra Midal is a Full Professor at HEAD – Geneva. An artist and curator, she combines practice- and theory-based research with exhibitions, art writing, and film essays. 

 Former Director of the Frac Haute-Normandie and assistant to Dan Graham, she has curated numerous exhibitions addressing visual and popular culture, as well as politics. Her curatorial projects include Double Agent (Ljubljana, Milan, 2025), Top Secret (Cinémathèque Française, Paris, 2022; La Caixa, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza, 2022–2025), Popcorn (MAMC, Saint-Étienne, 2017), Eames & Hollywood (ADAM, Brussels, 2016), Politique-Fiction (Cité du design, Saint-Étienne, 2013), Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami, 2012), and Tomorrow Now (MUDAM, Luxembourg, 2007), among others. Her work has been presented in exhibitions such as Au Bonheur at CEAAC, Strasbourg (2022–2023), and Drive-In at CAPC, Bordeaux (2018–2019). Her books include The Murder Factory (Zones), Design by Accident: For a New History of Design (Sternberg Press), and Do You Speak Flower? (Les Presses du réel). In 2026, she published La Puissance des images (Empire), Witches of Design: Ann Lee, transes et féminisme (Raddar), and Hocus Pocus (Mudac).