The Poignancy of a Perpetual Spring

In her latest work Marita Pappa is creating a taxonomy of artificial flora that decorate the restaurants and their outdoor spaces around the city. The artist has been a ferocious walker her whole life, a practice that deeply shapes her artistic making. During her walks she started noticing beautiful marigolds and flamboyant magnolias resisting high temperatures, thriving, sprawling and towering all over New York and became increasingly curious about the abundance of fake blossoms and plants around the city. Hardly indistinguishable from the real ones, these beautiful, ever so colourful artificial arrangements became very popular during the pandemic where the restaurant owners used them as a solution to dress up their dining sheds and a marketing tool to attract customers to their restaurants. A similar shift happened after the Great Recession where the faux flower industry sales skyrocketed. American anthropologist Margaret Mead in the New York Times 1964 article “The Flowering Of Fake Flowers” argues that the proliferation of artificial flowers both in the domestic and in the public sphere in post war America is an attempt of people to circumvent nature and an effort to gain some sense of permanence.

Following the disappearance of most of these outdoor constructs due to the city's new measures and the use of these spaces as shelters by homeless people, the artist is questioning the nature of these arrangements beyond the decorative. In Pappa's work, one is asked to rethink their relationship to public space and to look at the overlooked in their every day surroundings. In these floral arbors there is an inherent tension that the artist is drawn to. Their artificial nature evokes a state of melancholy and the same time there is a sense of familiarity. The poignancy of this perpetual spring, one that is slowly disappearing becomes a symbol of the city's resiliency but also a testament to the fiction of permanence offered by their materiality. In this series of works, artificial flowers become speculative objects, that we might need to think critically about their existing systems, their social and environmental consequences as well as their potential futures. If the desire to blend outdoor and indoor spaces and simulate nature is ultimately our inability to accept death, one might wonder what the future holds for our ever changing society and the human condition. Can we make peace with the inconvenient truth that perhaps only in the temporal nature of real flowers, ones that fade and die, we can look and feel real?