Arbusto Ardiente has its origins in a residency carried out in 2015 by Amaia Urra in the landscape garden of the Parc Jean-Jacques-Rousseau at Ermenonville in Oise, Paris, where the philosopher spent his last weeks. The piece, one of the most recent by the artist, starts from the reading and rewriting of different botanical manuals to propose a new cataloguing of plants that escape the objective categories of science, preferring classifications linked to popular culture and other semantic, formal and affective logics. Like other works by Amaia Urra, this piece focuses on language and the action of naming things and the difficulty that this entails.
More than an action, Arbusto Ardiente is presented as a situation or a landscape. The sound of the voice intervenes and is camouflaged in the vegetation, evoking scenes typical of romantic novels, or Mexican plays on words, while the perception of the voice is transformed through repetition, causing shifts in meaning.
