On a planet changing at breakneck speed, some plants disappear before we ever get the chance to know them. Scientific research warns that each day, quietly—without witnesses and without a trace—around 135 species of plants, animals, and insects vanish. The loss of flora doesn’t echo like eruptions or storm strikes, yet it marks one of the deepest transformations of our time. Ecosystems are unraveling, habitats are shifting, and the natural rhythms that have shaped plant life for centuries are becoming unstable and fragile.
The Meta-Garden exhibition emerges as an artistic response to this quiet disappearing. Seven rare plants—once found in our surroundings—are presented as rendered memories, X-ray-like outlines of what once lived in our landscapes. Artist Jelena Novaković shows these plants in their present-day invisibility: at the moment they become delicate traces and fragile silhouettes, bravely poised between presence and disappearance. Through augmented reality, accessed via the Artivive app, visitors can see these plants in their living, full form—a digital surrogate for what we can no longer encounter in nature.
Just as natural history museums reconstruct fossils to bring long-lost organisms back to life, Meta-Garden uses contemporary technology to pair the emotion of loss with scientific facts—and turn data into lived experience. In dialogue with the Palace of Science’s permanent exhibition section dedicated to planet Earth, each plant is linked to an Anthropocene process, reminding us that biodiversity loss, climate change, and land degradation affect every leaf, every root, and every form of life.
This exhibition doesn’t romanticize disappearance—it makes it visible, inviting us to pause and ask: do we notice the plants that are too rare to be easily seen, yet too important to be forgotten?