Female scientists, illustrators and explorers of the past who contributed significantly to the development of modern botany have often been misunderstood or dismissed from official knowledge. The Extinct Desinence is a video that focuses on the lives and discoveries of some of them. The material, sourced from archive images and ad hoc footage from the botanical gardens of London and Zurich, is edited using stop-motion and collage techniques. The work, together with a jacquard tapestry displayed in the museum's atrium, completes a larger project that addresses the theme of the extinction of indigenous languages and their relation to medicinal plants.  Some of these languages accompany us as sound counterpoints on a visionary journey between words and images. Botanists, that history has condemned to oblivion, share a similar fate with the disappearance of native languages and, consequently of traditional pharmaceutical knowledge. The name of these female botanists just as the indigenous words that designate plants are like dead seeds to be brought back to life.

“La desinenza estinta” is a project by artist Lucia Veronesi curated and produced by Ramdom (Italy) made in collaboration with the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum MiST (Trondheim, Norway); with the support of the University of Zurich - Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany and Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies (Zurich, Switzerland) (Zurich, Switzerland); Goldsmiths University (London, UK); Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (Museum of destination of the work) and Italian Cultural Institute, Oslo.

The project is made with the support of Collezione Luca Bombassei. Catalogo Marsilio Arte