The Flower Effect

The Flower Effect unfolds as a direct yet deliberately unfinished dialogue between botany and ideological belonging, tracing their reciprocal influence in the construction of national symbols and their resonances in the present.

Installed within Prague’s former Federal Assembly, the work finds its setting in the utopian architecture of Karel Prager, completed in 1974. The building—subsequently repurposed as the headquarters of Radio Free Europe and now serving as the temporary main site of the National Museum—acts as both historical frame and ideological counterpart to the project.

Within this former parliament, The Flower Effect presents a series of illustrations developed in collaboration with scientific botanical illustrators. These works depict fictitious rose hybrids, cross-pollinated between the Europa rose (1928) and varieties named after the founding figures of the European Union—an exclusively male political lineage. Among them are the Sir Winston Churchill Rose (1955), Konrad Adenauer Rose (1954), Jean Monnet Rose (1988), Souvenir de Robert Schuman Rose® (1998), Mansholt Rose (1966), Victor Hugo® Rose (1985), Mazzini Rose (1925), Natali Rose (1981), and the Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt Rose (1933).

Until the nineteenth century, rose hybridisation occurred spontaneously, mediated by insects or through self-pollination. The practice of controlled cross-breeding was first systematised by André Dupont, gardener to Empress Joséphine, establishing an early link between botanical cultivation, the production of new varieties, and systems of international power and diplomacy. These associations persist today, most visibly in sites such as the White House Rose Garden, which also lends its name to the “Rose Garden strategy,” reinforcing the connection between floral display, political staging, and statecraft.

As symbols of both sexualised and political desire, roses have long functioned as vehicles for commemorating national identity—through allegory, nomenclature, and diplomatic gesture. Across the twentieth century, shifts in nationalism and moments of political redefinition can be traced through the proliferation of rose hybrids named after figures and ideals positioned as national “treasures.”

Cibic’s project emerges from the conspicuous absence of women in the founding narratives of the European Union, set against the persistent use of a female allegory—Europa—to personify that very union. Like the speculative hybrids produced through cross-pollination, these political formations remain contingent, shaped by external forces and conditions, and marked by an inherent instability that underscores the fragility of both ideological constructs and the identities they seek to naturalise.