The Lost Flower Almanac | Abner Preis

The Lost Flower Almanac van Abner Preis

On the Tolhuistuin grounds you will find the five parts of The Lost Flower Almanac by Abner Preis. This artwork was created for Floriade and will also have a place at Tolhuistuin. This augmented reality artwork lets you explore life lost and saved: From flowers that became extinct long ago to the return of gray wolves to the Netherlands.

The work is made up of five digital gardens inspired by drawings from archives worldwide. Many flora and fauna were documented in drawings, sketches and paintings in the period before photographic recording was possible. Use your smartphone to scan the QR code and discover the magical feral reality of a past that is no longer there and a future that is just around the corner.

Artist Abner Preis works through art projects as a “storyteller” of specifically fairy tales. In his artistic practice, he tells stories about the world and man's experience in it, with empathy as his goal. After many years of using mainly performance and encounter art as a means, in recent years he has largely been working with new technology as a form of storytelling, specifically virtual reality.

1. A digital garden of extinct flora

Most of the plants in this digital garden are long extinct. These images were gathered from various open source bio heritage collections. There are many theories for their extinction: destruction of wild habitat, overexploitation, invasive species, pollution and, increasingly, climate change.

2. The comeback

For nearly 150 years wolves were absent from the Netherlands, their numbers declining due to hunting and habitat loss. Recently, however, they have returned. At a time when biodiversity is a global crisis, the comeback of wolves in the region gives hope for conservation efforts.

3. A garden that heals

Medicinal plants have been part of our lives since prehistoric times, and some of them have been crucial in the discovery of medicines and the advancement of modern medicine. But climate change, biodiversity loss and over-harvesting are also threatening them.

4. Flowers in the air: butterflies and bees

This illustration shows examples of the bees and butterflies that have disappeared from the Netherlands. There are about 360 species of bees in the Netherlands, but more than half of these species are on the Red List. The survival of both bees and butterflies is threatened mainly by the following three factors: the increase of agricultural land without wildflowers, chemical pollution and climate change.

5. Flowers in the sky: birds

More than a hundred bird species have gone extinct worldwide since 1500, and the rate of extinction seems to be increasing in recent decades. Their habitats have been quietly wiped out by intensive agriculture, overfishing and the introduction of agricultural chemicals, among other things. This illustration shows several bird species that used to be common in the Netherlands but have now disappeared. Some of these birds have migrated away, others are extinct.