CEMETERY: VERTICAL GARDEN AT NY MOMA

Commissioned by NY MoMA for the millennium exhibition Modern Starts: People, Places, Things. Museum of Modern Art. New York, NY, U.S.A

CEMETERY: VERTICAL GARDEN (1992-1999)
Plastic flowers, graphite.

Part of a larger installation, this vertical garden pops out of the wall where crypts have been drawn in pencil, imitating the architecture of old cemeteries in Colombia. The permanent beauty of the plastic flowers hides more disturbing elements, such as our fascination with death and violence. It also represents the need for a mourning process in a country of rampant violence.

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“ In the early 1990s, Cardoso began a series of works entitled Cemetery, Vertical Garden, in which she used plastic flowers, such as those that adorn cemeteries across Latin America, to create works inspired by funerary practices and rites. The flowers, usually lilies—a plant with a complex history and taxonomy—were installed as if growing in a perpendicular relationship to the gallery wall, extending horizontally out into the room. In one work, dense clusters of white-trumpet “Madonna” or Easter lilies (Lilium longiflorum) emulate the natural groupings and seem like so many clouds. In another in this series, a single stem of deep red calla lilies extends from within each one of numerous pencil outlines drawn on the wall, the outlines marking out the vertical system of grave alcoves that are the typical organization of Colombian cemeteries. Cardoso’s work brings together her interest in the scientific study of the natural world, its cultural inscription, here within popular customs related to death, and the specific recent history of Colombia, marked by violence. As well as these cemeteries or gardens, she also made wreaths that were “.

Roca, Jose y Martin, Alejandro.
Animalario of Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
(Bogota: Seguros Bolívar, 2013), 18 - 19.