Paul Rosero Contreras

The Garden of Forking Paths, 2025

Artwork location: Vallisaari Island

The main protagonists in Paul Rosero Contreras’ installation are the diverse cohabitors of Vallisaari Island: linden trees, snails, mushrooms, bombycoidea moths, their eggs and larvae. The artist is inspired by the idea of hybridization and the intermixing of nature and human-made structures on Vallisaari Island. Studying the island and its history led him to wonder what the island’s gunpowder magazines and artillery batteries would look like if they were to be overtaken by flora and fauna. Spreading across two rooms in the Alexander Battery, the installation depicts plants, insects and other non-human species in supernatural proportions. Giant linden flowers sprawl the floors, cohabiting the space with the eggs of the bombycoidea moth, whose larvae are known for cloaking Vallisaari’s trees and bushes in gossamer webs.

An unnaturally giant tree slug slithers across, leaving behind a trail of shimmering slime, while the adjoining room is overgrown with uncanny, organically mounding vegetation. Rosero Contreras employs novel techniques and materials such as bioplastics and 3D printing in his installations. The sculpture made of mycelium that emulates the round shape of the island and its gunpowder magazines, also evokes the bulbous silhouette of Azorella compacta, a plant native to the Andes. The artist often uses experimental biomaterials that he himself also develops, such as mycelium that metabolizes plastic waste.