Sea garden
These planters are the result of the art workshop Gardens of Delirium, organised by Fundación Botín and led by artist Solange Pessoa, with the support of Daniel Pinho, from 21 to 29 September 2026.
©Daniel Pinho
During the workshop, fifteen artists, filmmakers and landscape designers from around the world visited a number of gardens in Cantabria. Solange invited them to look, to observe, to draw, and to let the hand improvise what the eye did not yet know how to name.
From this collective process came drawings, sculptures, videos, installations and these two planters, sown by all the participants together with Solange. The species planted here know how to live in this singular ecosystem: plants that accept the rain and the salt air, that bend before the wind, that make the open air their home.
Together they chose, together they sowed, together they cared. Then each returned to their own land, and the roots remained here, intertwined, just as the participants are. What you now see growing is the living memory of an encounter that the wind, the water and the salt continue to write.
Participants:
Andrea Acosta (Bogotá, Colombia, 1981); Amanda Bueno Seguin (Elche, Spain, 1992); Fernando Antonio Ceratti (São Paulo, Brazil, 1990); Renata Del Riego (Mexico City, Mexico, 1998); Ivan Erhel (Paris, France, 1977); Tom Haines (London, United Kingdom, 1978); Samuel Martin Schick (San Sebastián, Spain, 1999); Lisa Mur (Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1991); Sylvia Pennings (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1961); Natalia Pilo-Pais (Lima, Peru, 1984); Rafael Pérez Evans (Málaga, Spain, 1983); Jeanette Ramirez (San Félix, Venezuela, 1975); Ariana RAC (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2000); Goa Vázquez (Mondariz, Spain, 2002); María Villacorta (Arce, Spain, 1991).
Planting map and species:
Download the image here (PDF)
Tom Haines (Santander, Spain) y Rafael Pérez Evans (Oxford, UK) PLANTAPLANTAPLANTA, 2026
12-minute video with audio
A curated selection of plants find themselves living together in two planters at Centro Botín. Their new life unfolds as a late-night pirate radio jam gone wrong, in botanical slapstick and delirious floral improvisation. Meredith Monk-esque musings, free jazz and Beckettian madness meet as the plants laugh at the tedium of the human perspective, embracing the witchiness and camp of being vegetation.
Discover Solange Pessoa: Of Day or Night, an exhibition by this Brazilian artist whose work speaks of nature, memory, the body, spirituality and the earth from 10 October 2026 to 28 March 2027 at Centro Botín.
