Museum im Bellpark
2025

We are familiar with the idea of ramification from botany: in the case of the tree, aboveground elements like limbs and twigs visibly branch out in order to enlarge the overall leaf surface and thereby maximize processes of photosynthesis.

Vitra Design Museum.
2023
Interview by Viviane Stappmanns.

Landscape architect Céline Baumann designs urban environments,
but she also maintains a prolific practice as an artist and educator. Her Basel-based studio is committed to research on plant life and interrelations with humans. Her intersectional lens in turn informs her design work, in which she aims to create dynamic open spaces that respect the ecology of both humans and nature.

archithese
02.2020

The Queer Nature project explores the little-known, often-overlooked and rare intimate behavior of the botanical world. Inscribed in “a field that doesn’t quite exist”, it investigates the relationships between ecological thought and queer theory. By presenting the diversity of the vegetable kingdom, it celebrates the multitude of shapes, gender, sexes and colors around us, challenging the belief that matter and intelligence are dissociated.

Triennale Milano
2023

Many of the ornamental plant species with which we share the domestic space, taking care of them daily without wondering too much about their origin, were imported to Europe from exotic climes, generating what Céline Baumann defines as a “cognitive dissonance between the decorative aspect of potted plants and a brutal colonial history.”

Onomatopee
2024

A Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time.

l’esprit créateur
Winter 2022
Interview with Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari.

Plant sexual life becomes the subject of intense discussions in early modern botany. How does France, with its legacy of materialist libertine thought, become a hub for botanically-informed critique of human sexual norms and practices? How is early modern botany enmeshed with desire? Libertine Botany charts premodern explorations of the nonbinary sexuality of plants and investigates their effects on the gendering of the human polis. In conversation with contemporary discussions of sexuality, this special issue studies how– through a body of work anticipating queer politics, art, and ecology – the alien pleasures of plants give new contours to human experience.

dpr barcelona
2022

The bewildering nature of worldly Roadside Picnics pushes human and non-human beings across the planet to a similar situation.

Mille Cosmos #1
2022

« Queer Nature » est une recherche touchant à « un domaine qui n’existe pas tout à fait »
– selon l’expression de Timothy Morton –, à l’intersection entre écologie et théorie queer. En s’intéressant aux mécanismes de la reproduction sexuelle dans le monde végétal, le projet de Céline Baumann remet en cause l’image d’Épinal d’une nature associée à une certaine normalité, alibi ensuite utilisé pour décrier d’autres pratiques identifiées comme déviantes.

Journal of Landscape Architecture
03-2015

Written by Céline Baumann and Vesna Jovanović, this essay examines Parc de la Villette through what will be defined as the ‘versatile monument’ question, in order to discuss a nonlinear, i.e. dynamic, relationship between the processes of project commission – design and implementation – site management.