At the crossroads of design, art, architecture and popular culture, Alexandra Midal investigates the techniques developed by artists, designers and revolutionaries to conceal information and messages, through the lens of the coded language of flowers.
Do You Speak Flower? explores a field at the intersection of flowers and steganography. Steganography describes the practice of concealing secret information within an image, message or physical object to avoid detection. From a technical point of view, steganography has the particularity of being invisible, unlike cryptography, which consists of encrypting information in order to conceal it and therefore points to the existence of a message to be decrypted. More simply, cryptography hides the meaning whereas steganography hides the very existence of a secret.
Through a number of case studies at the crossroads of design, art and architecture, often flirting with popular culture, this essay by author and curator Alexandra Midal surveys the range of concealment practices employed by designers and artists, but above all by dissidents, revolutionaries and various kinds of agitators who want to communicate in secret without attracting suspicion. More specifically, it explores the unsuspected tactics of concealment that can lurk beneath the delicate, romantic language of floriography.
The book Do You Speak Flower? is published on the occasion of the 28th Biennial of Design, BIO28 Double Agent: Do You Speak Flower?, at the Museum of Architecture and Design and Galerija ISIS, and at the Mala galerija Banke Slovenije, Ljubljana, in 2024-2025.
Free-lance curator and Professor in the MA Spaces & Communication, Design Program at the HEAD – Genève, Ph.D. Alexandra Midal combine a curating and research activity in design and visual culture.
