[Concept]

Hortus Illusorius arises from the desire to restore to nature an imaginative and emotional dimension, temporarily removing it from explanation and classification.

Through display cases, magnifications, and theatrical micro-lighting, ordinary leaves, roots, seeds, and flowers are transformed into enigmatic presences, suspended between botanical reality and imagination.

Illusion does not come from artifice, but from a shift in perception. A vein may appear as a constellation, a root as a creature from a submerged world, a seed as a fragment of an as-yet-unknown form of life. Each element seems to oscillate between the real and the possible, between what exists and what could exist.

The installation invites visitors to slow down their gaze and inhabit a state of gentle perceptual uncertainty, where the boundary between observation and imagination becomes delicate.

It is a return to an original sense of wonder, to a condition in which the vegetal world is not yet an object of knowledge, but a living and indecipherable presence. An invitation to observe nature as if encountering it for the first time, restoring to it the right to preserve a part of its mystery and to withdraw, at least for an instant, from every attempt to be fully explained.