A knight was walking by a river with his beautiful girlfriend. She spotted some shy blue flowers on the bank and asked him to pick some for her. As he was putting together his bouquet, the knight slipped and fell into the water. His heavy armour prevented him from swimming, so he sank, but he still had time to throw his azure bouquet towards his beloved, shouting ‘Don’t forget me’. In despair, the young woman kept his memory in her heart and chose his last words to baptise the discreet and fragile flower: Forget-me-not.

This Germanic legend has greatly inspired the work of Elise Bergamini, for whom the notion of the living is in danger. In her drawings, embroidery and porcelain, the body finds itself mutated into a kingdom that is both animal and vegetable, on the lookout for the artist’s botanical mythologies. The body is transformed. Nature takes over, advancing and retreating. Forget-me-not flowers emerge from an embroidered mouth and speak to us. They don’t want to be forgotten. They feel in danger. Elise Bergamini’s flowers are a message about the fragility of the wild world, which we must not overlook.

Elise Bergamini talks about the melancholy of our environment and evokes the feeling of solastalgia, a concept coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe anxiety to an environment that is familiar but altered, sometimes irreparably. As the artist explains: ‘What would our world be without plants, birds and bees? Their presence is a message. A message we don’t want to hear when disaster threatens. Are they all condemned to one day populate only our memories? »