Through a careful observation that weaves together biology, ethnobotany, and ecology, the artistic practice of Sergio Rojas Chaves unfolds as a critical inquiry into the affective and colonial logics that shape our relationship with tropical plants. In his work, these species become catalysts of tension—between care and control, the private and the public, the ornamental and the political.
Sergio Rojas Chaves never set out to become an artist. His initial curiosity was directed toward biology, landscape architecture, and environmental studies. But it was precisely his disillusionment with the idea of a “protected” nature—one promoted by institutional discourses of global conservation, wrapped in eco-friendly promises and tropical advertising imagery—that led him to shift course. Since then, his work has occupied a space between the playful and the political: a zone where nature is not conceived as a distant other to be preserved, but as an intimate, conflictive, and culturally loaded terrain.
Educated between Costa Rica and Canada, with studies in architecture, art, and environmental science, Sergio began to observe the contradictions in how nature is represented and consumed. His time on Vancouver Island exposed him to a form of institutionalized exotification of Indigenous peoples—an aestheticized, spiritualized gaze that, while progressive on the surface, retained deeply colonial roots. In Canada, the banana plant—once a common sight in his childhood environment—was now an ornamental commodity sold in supermarkets. Upon returning to Costa Rica, he recognized the same dynamic reflected in interior design trends and a growing “green” enthusiasm that transformed utilitarian plants into coveted design objects.
From these tensions, Sergio builds a body of work that critically examines how plants—and the ways they are cared for, arranged, reproduced, and socially valorized—also function as vehicles for class, gender, and power relations. Yet his approach does not rely on didacticism or solemn denunciation. He prefers conversation, participatory play, and performative gestures that invite reflection. He organizes events where people share why they love their plants, collects improvised flowerpots, and explores gardening manuals written by women for women, revealing in them an unofficial archive of affection and reproductive labor. In this way, plants become an excuse to talk about people, about inherited systems of care, about the desire for connection, and about control disguised as love.
His projects do not seek to provide binary answers about whether having houseplants is a colonial, capitalist, or affective act. Instead, they insist on ambiguity: that affection can also be extractive; that care can imply control; that daily gestures with plants may simultaneously reproduce violence and resist it. It is precisely within this gray zone that his work takes root.
Ultimately, Sergio is not interested in telling us how not to kill plants—but in what we project onto them. His work distrusts the fictions of “green” aesthetics and avoids easy solutions, instead inviting us to look closely—and unmake—the affective and power structures that shape our everyday relationships with nature.
Text written by Cristina Ramírez
