IRIS MUTANTI OFFICINALIS
Iris Mutanti Officinalis
L’Almanach Biennale - Consortium Museum, Dijon - 03.07.2026 to 31.03.2027
Barnabé Fillion (1981, Paris) lives and works between Paris, Venice, and Kyoto. Alongside his studies in photography, he became interested in perfumery and has developed a synesthetic practice. For more than a decade, he has composed fragrances for various houses and collaborated with designers and artists, among them Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno and Anicka Yi.
This exhibition, situated at the crossroads of his path between perfumery, botany, and visual arts and design, forms part of a body of research built around a "mutant iris," developed as a possible new species by Barnabé Fillion and his studio: Iris Mutanti Officinalis. Through this project, he presents a series of nocturnal studies devoted to this mutant flower, poised at the threshold between botanical apparition, fiction, and perceptual memory.
The project was born from the encounter between this research on the iris and a set of residual images drawn from the perfumer's journal. These images find their origin in the Japanese notion of makyō: the first visions that appear when we close our eyes within a space of contemplation. They are transcribed here through a photographic process by which he questions the possibility of fixing a portion of these shifting images.
The exhibition brings this visual research into dialogue with the olfactory transformation of the iris. In perfumery, iris is extracted from the plant's rhizome, slowly dried and reduced to powder before being processed to yield its olfactory material.
This transformation is of particular interest to Barnabé Fillion, because the scent of the iris is not extracted from the visible flower, but from a buried matter - invisible, subterranean, and horizontal.
The exhibition thus seeks to bring into relation this invisible matter of perfume, the residual images stirred by our senses, and the possible dream of flowers. A question runs through the entire project: do flowers dream, and do they share their dreams with one another? And what if these dreams constituted the reality of our own world? Do they, then, dream of our reality?
Each piece thus acts as an observation of the Iris Mutanti Officinalis: not only a flower, but also an anomaly of a perceptual phenomenon, the residual apparition of a fictional organism in the process of becoming.
