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Debora Hirsch's practice centers on biodiversity preservation and endangered species. In seeking to restore the complexity of the real, her work draws on botanical, ecological, historical, and cultural studies through a methodology grounded in investigations, reinterpretation, and theoretical reflection.

Her recent research develops within the evolving field of plant humanities, where she examines our shifting relationship with plant life. Working with drawing and painting, AI models, proprietary datasets, algorithmic processes, post-production, and animation, she explores the structures of artistic narratives that can emerge in response to the commodification of plants, our collective obliviousness to vegetal life, and the lack of reverence for the nonhuman world though an inquiry into the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of extinction.

 

Her sources embrace herbaria, scientific archives, rare books, illustrations, digital repositories, textual materials, and at the same time conversations with scientists, humanists, and botanists often shape the conceptual architecture of her work. 

On her works, beauty serve to sharpen attention, to draw the viewer into the life of plants. In the Plant series for example, she generates AI-based compositions using a model fine-tuned with her datasets and then she combines these proliferations into singular visual statements, that are recorded on the blockchain creating a permanent virtual archive of plants we risk losing.

 

In the Plantalia project, the plants are presented in a state of perpetual transformation, evoking the temporal instability of threatened ecologies, while in Herbaria the archival specimens are only temporarily revived, to let them vanish again, confronting the irreversibility of extinction. The Sylva Birds in these works, emerged algorithmically as unsolicited feral birds, symbols of life beyond our control, and of the agency embedded in generative systems. 
 

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