Nico Joana Weber - Monstera Deliciosa by Karin Harrasser

This artist’s book by Nico Joana Weber mounts an insightful and calculated photographic investigation into the dichotomy of rational (European) modernism in architecture versus the “irrational” proliferation of nature in tropical regions. Citing a range of historical and cultural references, from Le Corbusier’s visits to Argentina and Niemeyer’s Brazilian modernism, to the Amazonian expeditions of Lévi-Strauss, her vast collection of images points to how the fragile balance between architecture, the body, and vegetation inherent to the tropics shifts the separation between nature and culture so crucial to the Western perspective into the realm of the impossible.