2024/25 – Mixed Media Photography / Ostkreuzschule
The disappearance of living species is accelerating at the rate of the various industrial revolutions. There is an urgent need to slow down, if only to grasp the current catastrophe. Two centuries ago, the aim was to discover new species. In present time, we record the ongoing and future extinctions. Whether threatened or witnessed, how are the remaining beings affected by this profound mutation? And what imaginaries could we build in response to the fragility of ecosystems in the Anthropocene?
Vincent Jondeau’s project poetically explores this reflection by confronting his own vision of the plant world with the botanical drawings made by his ancestor at the end of the 19th century. Through portrayals of plants encountered in his daily life in North Berlin and preserved in his family archive, he probes an era where the question of survival has overtaken that of progress..
Each photograph is accompanied by a brief text, adding a documentary, intimate, and poetic dimension to the images. Whether narrating the singular fate of the plants encountered, sharing personal reflections, or providing historical and botanical commentary, these texts deepen the exploration of ecological vulnerability. The vertical formats in this series are printed on paper chosen to closely match the texture and size of historical botanical drawings, humbly placing the artist in the footsteps of his ancestor — just as a seed may germinate years, or even centuries, after the plant that bore it. The horizontal formats are shown as hybrid forms between film and photography: two silent pieces displayed on small monitors, and a third projected onto a white surface, accompanied by a musical composition by Atlas Glaas, built around the gradual exhaustion of a melody. Through subtle variations in light, these three-channel installations explore dynamics of survival and extinction.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
« Aesculus” tells the story of a chestnut tree seed that germinated in the 19th century and now reappears like a specter, evoking the profound transformation that has shaped our world since. Today, the once-mighty chestnut trees, now increasingly affected by diseases like leaf miner and canker, stand as fragile symbols of ecological change.
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Photography, 2025
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
The young sprout depicted in this image was born at a pivotal moment in the history of its species. For a long time, humans had developed close relationships with it, but the second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of a different kind of relation. Like its sisters Hevea, Corchorus, Agave, Cocos, Jatropha, and Elaeis, Ricinus experienced a shift in the way it was seen. The European empires paved the way for an extractivist botany that supported the industrial expansion of their societies. Plantations of Ricinus appeared across French and British colonies, subjugating human and plant bodies alike to extract the lubricating oil from its seeds. Displaced, acclimatized, and monitored, Ricinus came to experience what it means to be turned into a pure resource, a vanished life.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 32 x 42
© Vincent Jondeau
« Canna » tells the story of a plant synonymous with prosperity and vitality, whose depicted specimen took root in the 19th century. Today, it reemerges in an arid landscape, whose contours evoke a drifting continent. Isolated on this floating land, it desperately searches for others species with which to interact, to resume the invisible dance of its predecessors, the dance that once regulated ecosystems. This image is a reminder that plants, too, can suffer from solitude. Deprived of their living communities, they experience stress, stunted growth, and heightened vulnerability to disease. Like humans, they thrive best within a vibrant, diverse network of life.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 42 x 32
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Single-Channel Video Projection, 2024
3:48min, 4K, B/W
Music: Atlas Glaas
© Vincent Jondeau
A thicket of young tree shoots stands bathed in light, their bluish stems glowing with an almost luminescent presence. This grove has taken root in a landscape shaped by history, an area in northern Berlin once defined by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989). During those decades, vegetation quietly reclaimed the no-man’s lands left behind by human conflict. When the wall fell, these islands of nature remained, forming the distinctive, verdant landscape of this part of Berlin, still spared from relentless urban development.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (Color). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
« Acer negundo Nr. 2 » tells the story of young tree shoots that have taken root in a vacant lot in northern Berlin. This pioneering species thrives in disturbed, poor, or polluted soils characteristic of urban wastelands, abandoned riverbanks, and neglected spaces. The bluish tint of its stems, a waxy layer meant to protect it from dehydration, UV rays, fungi, and insects, now reminds me of the spectral fate of this plant I encountered. The vacant lot where it stood was sterilized by its owner, who tore out all vegetation and replaced the soil with sand. Life had flourished in this place, bringing together neighborhood children, plants, animals, insects, and microorganisms. Today, the site is used as a temporary parking lot, packed with rental cars, while investors wait for speculative prices to rise before selling the land.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (Color). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
« Tilia » tells the story of a plant species deeply rooted in European landscapes, and largely present in Berlin, yet now threatened by a parasite encouraged by human activity. Rendered as a negative, the image reveals the scars of its alteration, while its presentation on the scan of an antique paper offers a space of contemplation and reflection.
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Drawing, 1890
Pencil on antique Paper, 22 x 32
© Louis Edmont Chapuis
This drawing are part of a ten-year preparatory study by my ancestor, a photographer and lithographer, created between 1884 and 1894—likely in anticipation of a now-lost botanical publication. The series reflects a fascination with seeds and sprouting life, capturing with remarkable sensitivity the living essence of these specimens, with whom he must have forged a quiet intimacy. Following this botanical study, he embarked on a project with photographer Louis Venot, documenting the city of Dijon and the Burgundy region over five summers between 1898 and 1904. The photographs from this series chronicle, with everyday yet deeply evocative views, a world now vanished—a transition between centuries, carrying the hopes of progress and the disillusions to come.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
« Echinops » tells the story of a perennial plant, symbolizing resistance and protection. Its metallic sheen recalls the strength of certain species in the face of the harshest conditions. Between decline and renewal, the withered yet still rounded shape of its flower echoes the seeds it has scattered, evoking the uninterrupted cycle of life.
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Drawing, 1886
Pencil on antique Paper, 22 x 32
© Louis Edmont Chapuis
This drawing depicts a plant that, though palm-like, belongs to a much older lineage: the cycads, an ancient group of non-flowering plants that have existed since the time of the dinosaurs, over 250 million years ago. Created in 1886, the drawing reflects the European fascination with exotic plants during the 19th century, when specimens like the Cycas began populating the gardens of aristocrats and collectors. By the 20th century, with the rise of commercial nurseries, these prehistoric plants had become widespread as ornamental species, adapting to new, artificial habitats far from their original ecosystems.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (Color). Print, 22 x 32
© Vincent Jondeau
“Cycas” tells the story of an exotic plant that has become common in domestic spaces. The plant in the photograph was likely abandoned due to signs of lifelessness. Its silvery palms emerge from the shadows, and the colors of the image seem to reflect the corruption of the environment in which it is slowly dying.
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Photography 2025
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 32 x 42
© Vincent Jondeau
« Fallopia » tells the story of a creeping, climbing plant considered one of the most invasive species in Europe and North America. Described as an opportunist, it is said to threaten biodiversity through its ability to eliminate local flora and alter soils. Its preferred habitats are those where the ecological balance has been disturbed by natural phenomena or human activities. The shadow in this image, like an invisible threat, evokes the sometimes ambivalent role of certain species in accelerating the degradation of a world already weakened by human activity.
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Photography 2025
Archival Pigment (B/W)
Print, 22 x 32
At the edge of a forest in northern Berlin, a plant bears a powdery white veil on its leaves, glowing in the light like a spectral trace. The cause is powdery mildew, one of the most widespread fungal diseases on Earth, affecting an immense variety of plants across every continent except Antarctica. This prehistoric fungus has co-evolved with plant life for millions of years, long before human agriculture. Yet, the intensification of global trade in the 19th century and the industrialization of agriculture in the 20th have fueled its spread, making it more resilient to treatments. Fading onto the surface of an antique paper, this image echoes the ghostly fate of plants afflicted by this silent infection.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 32 x 22
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Single-Channel Video on Monitor, 2025
Loop, 4K, B/W
Silent
© Vincent Jondeau
The plant captured in this image is not currently facing extinction, yet the scars on its leaves speak of a profound fragility. Native to Southeast Asia, Rhaphidophora tetrasperma has gradually become a quintessential exotic ornament — from 19th-century European greenhouses to today’s global trade networks. Cultivated in standardized, soilless conditions, severed from its living relations and cloned, it arrived at my home a few years ago as a stem cutting from a friend’s apartment. Since then, it has battled mealybugs feeding on its sap, weakening it daily. This parasite’s attack, in the ecologically poor, hostile, and disconnected environment of my human habitat, is the final link in a long chain of depletion caused by industrial and commercial processes. Faced with the vulnerability of this cloned yet singular plant, I feel deeply uncomfortable about green capitalism’s strategies that portray its species as a symbol of well-being and care.
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Photography, 2024
Archival Pigment (B/W). Print, 42 x 32
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Single-Channel Video on Monitor, 2025
Loop, 4K, B/W
Silent
© Vincent Jondeau
In the Volkspark Schönholzer Heide, in the north of Berlin. I encountered a dying old linden tree, likely planted at the end of the 19th century. Its gaping trunk was sutured by a thick spiderweb. Over time, this tree has stood as a silent witness to the transformations of the landscape — from royal plantation to a popular leisure spot for Berliners, then a forced labor camp during the Second World War, and later an abandoned zone near the Berlin Wall during the Cold War. Its death is not an extinction. As is now customary in this forested park, dead plant matter is left in place to support the regeneration of natural cycles. The tree will continue to shelter a wide variety of life — spiders, birds, bats, beetles, ants, but also fungi, lichens, mosses, and bacteria involved in its decomposition. Its transformation into organic matter will also help nourish the soil and provide essential nutrients for other plant species.
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— 2025 | Photopolis Festival (Agrínio/GR) • Group Exhibition “Mother Nature–Mother Earth” 26.4-11.5.
— 2025 |Float Photo Magazine (US) • Online exhibition “Whispering Shadows” 20.01
— 2024 |La Coupole (Dijon/FR) • Joint exhibition “Protéger les vivants” 16.12-30.12
— 2024 |PEP x BPM (Mulhouse/FR) • Group exhibition “(Im)possible worlds” 13.09-13.10
— 2024 |Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin/DE) • Group exhibition “Wir werden sehen” 29.05-02.06
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Float Photo Magazine
“Whispering Shadows”
https://www.floatmagazine.us/online-exhibitions/exhibitions/whispering-shadows#group-229
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La Coupole – Dijon
« Protéger les vivants »
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Biennale Photo Mulhouse x PEP
« (Im)possible Worlds »
« Among other universes, the public can discover that of artist and filmmaker Vincent Jondeau through an image from his series “Verschwinden” – literally: “disappear”. It shows a plant whose silvery palms seem to emerge from the shadows. As if devitalized, the colors reflect the corruption of the environment in which it is dying. This simple, powerful and edifying image, featured on the cover of this catalog, is a clear illustration of the threat of extinction of many species in the fragile ecosystems of the Anthropocene. »
https://www.biennale-photo-mulhouse.com/2024/bpm-x-pep-impossible-worlds
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Kunstquartier Bethanien
« Wir Werden Sehen »
Station №1(Drawings by Louis Edmont Chapuis, 1800s | Wilted Flowers Jar)
Station№2 (3:48min, Projector loop)/ Music by Atlas Glass
Station№3 (5:02min, Monitor loop)
https://diemotive.de/event/wir-werden-sehen-2
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