Nona Inescu
Venus Traps, 2024

The Venus Trap creates a heterotopic enclosed space in which several works, with different materialities, are in dialogue with each other. Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden can be a heterotopia, if it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments, with plants from around the world. Michel Foucault uses the garden as an “other site” to illustrate the heterotopia as a spatial typology. The heterotopia forms one side of a reflective relationship he describes between utopias and heterotopias (as actual sites which are “other” enough to become an alternative, actual realities). This formula of the ideal world (utopia) with the actual world (heterotopia) is what Foucault calls “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.”