6.–15.3.2026

Cacao Tree (2026) is a video work that examines botanical exoticism through Theobroma cacao. For the work, I filmed a living cacao tree at the Helsinki Botanical Garden, cacao specimens from the herbarium collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History, and a Fazer chocolate confectionery box from the 1950s. In 1978, a cacao sapling was donated to the Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden by Fazer’s Director of Research at the time. The tree currently growing in the garden is a descendant of that sapling, which originated in the North Solomons, Papua New Guinea. The cacao specimens I filmed at the Finnish Museum of Natural History were collected at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them the botanist Christian von Steven.

The work on this piece has been supported by the Swedish Cultural Foundation.