Debora Hirsch's practice centers on biodiversity preservation and endangered plant species. In seeking to restore the complexity of the real, her work draws on botanical, ecological, historical, and cultural studies through a methodology grounded in investigations, reinterpretation, and theoretical reflection. Working with drawing and painting, AI models, proprietary datasets, algorithmic processes, post-production, and animation, she explores the structures of artistic narratives that can emerge in response to the commodification of plants, our collective obliviousness to vegetal life, and the lack of reverence for the nonhuman world though an inquiry into the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of extinction.
In Plant, she generates AI-based fragments/compositions using a model fine-tuned with her datasets to reproduce her own painting style and Colonial imagery, and specific plant species. She then combines these proliferations into singular visual statements, that are recorded on the blockchain creating a symbolic permanent virtual archive of plants we risk losing.
In the Plantalia project, the plants are presented in a state of perpetual transformation, evoking the temporal instability of threatened ecologies, while in Herbaria the archival specimens are only temporarily revived, to let them vanish again, confronting the irreversibility of extinction.
The Sylva Birds in these works, emerged algorithmically as unsolicited feral birds, symbols of life that exists beyond our control, and of the agency embedded in generative systems.
Her recent research develops within the field of Plant Humanities, where she examines our shifting relationship with plant life. The installation Vanishing Trees talks about three monumental trees unfolding the sources that the artist embraces like herbaria, scientific archives, rare books, illustrations, digital repositories, textual materials, and at the same time conversations with scientists, humanists, and botanists that often shape the conceptual architecture of her work.