Synthétique Amazonas

The title sets a trap it wants you to notice. Cubensis is pan-tropical and domesticated, not native to the Amazon at all, so to grow it under the name Amazonas is a deliberate disjunction. What the apparatus actually reproduces is a set of equatorial climate parameters, not any particular forest; and reproducing "the tropics" as a single, portable climate is precisely what colonial botany has always done. The Amazon here is not a geography but the colonial imaginary's name for the equatorial in general: the place that gets abstracted, packaged, and grown indoors. The work is critical of that conflation, not an instance of it.

Underneath the disjunction is a flat, hard claim: climate is not the same as place. A European laboratory can match the Amazon's temperature, its humidity, its light cycle. And it can match nothing else. It cannot reproduce the soil microbiome, the seasonal rhythms, the surrounding biodiversity, or the indigenous management that held the rainforest's composition together for millennia. The growbox is the small, scaled-down proof of the gap: a climate reproduced perfectly and a place not reproduced at all. The colonial dream of carrying the tropics home, intact, is exactly the dream that founds extraction, and the box makes its impossibility visible.

And it is personal. The growbox is a native land assembled from equipment: the artist's own equatorial origin reconstituted, synthetically, under lamps in Europe. The towering thin mushrooms reach back toward that origin; the box offers belonging as a recipe of settings. To grow a homeland from spores in a sterile cabinet is to admit that the place you came from is now, from here, available only as a list of parameters (temperature, humidity, hours of light) and never as the place itself.

"No explicit discussion of Cubensis Albino as a psilocybin-containing species. The work's engagement with a psychoactive organism is entirely implicit."

Critical review, 2026

The silence was strategic, and it has lasted long enough to name now. Cubensis Albino A+ is a psilocybin species; the work first showed in Switzerland, where spore possession is unregulated, and the institutional ambiguity protected the project, but the silence has become evasive. So: yes, a psychoactive species; yes, with full awareness of the indigenous Amazonian lineage of psychoactive plants, and no wish to romanticise it. The work is not about altered states. It positions the European cultivation of Cubensis inside the long history of botanical extraction the rainforest has undergone. Its real question is whose biology gets cultivated where, by whom, and with what colonial residue.