In a crack, between two stones, near a highway rail, in the shade of a dump or a street lamp, in a corner of the forest, it rises upwards, where others would like to lie down and fade away in silence. Without excessive pomp, it grows hastily, its roots work downwards, its stem stretches towards the light. She lives at the junction of two worlds. She cares little about not being wanted, she pushes, not without intention, but without apparent consciousness. Its way of being in the world is to resist, to be there, governed like us by laws that go beyond us and from which no living person can be exempt. Realizing Darwinian intuition, it adapts, perhaps better than others, its existence depends on it. The rhetoric that focuses on it tenses it into a negative representation, we say it is invasive, exotic or bad, but who are we to qualify it like that? The nomenclature is also intended to be pictorial: tree of the gods, weed of the devil, trumpet of angels, clover of flies, ragweed. “To misname things is to add to the misfortune of the world,” Camus told us… Yann Mingard, whose photographic research takes its source in the Anthropocene and its representations, observes them with a more obliging eye and gives them another state of consciousness: they are indocile, traveling. They are ultimately no more exotic or indigenous than others − oaks or tomatoes, before becoming icons of a European identity, have also crossed oceans and borders, carried by birds, the wind or men. If some consider these plants as one of the main causes of the collapse of biodiversity, they have the specificity of adapting to soils polluted by heavy metals and of being able to assimilate in large quantities arsenic, barium, chromium or cadmium, which are all sediments from the fruits of capitalism, industrial modernity and anthropic activities. They survive where others die. Where this modernity consumes oxygen, plants produce it − breath − and to the idea that nature would be something original and static, they oppose their resilience. Nature is not of the order of the prerequisite: natura moreover means “that which will be generated” and carries even in its etymology the force of a becoming which is written. Strange dichotomy: from these metals from which we make munitions, electronic circuits, servers, plants synthesize the oxygen necessary for life. Beyond the concern conveyed by this herbarium and these depigmented landscapes, made of the dense fabric of the rustling matter of the undergrowth, Yann Mingard refuses the temptation of desolation and views the world in the manner of an archaeologist, through the traces and scars inscribed on the landscape which remind us as much of the dislocation of a cannibalistic humanity as of the possibility of a future that reinvents itself. Texts by Urs Stahel and Jérôme Sother