Laure Vigna’s glass sculptures are shaped by the life they contain. Modelled after the topology of the Klein bottle – a volume with a continuous surface without clear inside or outside – these blown-glass sculptures host colonies of cyanobacteria.

By producing oxygen as a waste product, cyanobacteria are assumed to be responsible for oxygenating the Earth’s atmosphere two billion years ago. Their symbiotic fusion with eukaryotes led them to eventually evolve into plant and algal cells capable of performing photosynthesis.

With the current climate breakdown, they proliferate in environments, mostly aquatic ecosystems, but can also be found in volcanoes or ice caps as they are resistant to extreme habitats. In our close habitat, these proliferations, which can be toxic, occur mainly due to the presence of humans providing the essential conditions for their development, thus becoming an indicator of highly polluted areas (for instance, the high levels of soil nitrates coming directly from fertilisers and monoculture intensive farming).

Cyanobacteria are the oldest bacteria in the world and have ceaselessly adapted to changes. In Vigna’s work, they return as co-agents, forming filaments on the glass surfaces of the sculptures, tinting them from within. The glass body acts as a host, so together they form a symbiotic whole. The glass sculptures, referring to the holobiont – the ecological unit of host and other species living in or around it – challenge the boundary between interiority and exteriority, between self and other.

(Borbála Szalai)