This interactive memory challenge invites participants to test their memory while exploring practical ways to preserve biodiversity based on Geneva’s municipal strategy. Players match “before-and-after” images that illustrate individual and institutional actions, and each correct pair reveals concise information explaining the measure. The activity examines themes such as habitat restoration, species-friendly practices, urban greening and policy responses, helping participants understand the impact and rationale behind everyday and organisational conservation choices.
This workshop explores the traditional process of assembling a herbarium specimen, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s collections. Participants learn scientific techniques for pressing and mounting dried plants on old paper, practice botanical labelling and nomenclature, and select specimens to create a personal herbarium sheet. The session examines preservation methods, identification principles and the historical context of Rousseau’s approach, combining practical skills with scientific insight to produce a lasting botanical object.
In French.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s herbarium, compiled in the 1770s for the printer-bookseller Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, is presented through preserved pressed specimens, its original catalogue and related botanical publications. The historical collection combines scientific observation and aesthetic arrangement, revealing Enlightenment approaches to collecting, classification and the popularisation of plant study. Detailed notes and annotations illuminate Rousseau’s techniques and the materiality of specimens, inviting reflection on how personal curiosity and scholarly networks shaped early modern natural history.
Explore the tiny treasures pressed between paper and time. Discover early plant collections from 20 or 200 years ago and read the notes of a child botanist who kept a journal at four and a half. Together with a botanist and science communicator, examine shapes, colors and textures of preserved leaves, compare old and new specimens, and learn to notice details in nature. This discovery invites curiosity and a gentle hands-on attention to plants.
Kids ages 4 and up. In French.
Francesco Pennacchio, photographer and author of Unlike Flowers, speaks with Fred Stauffer, Curator at the Geneva Botanic Garden, and Danaé Panchaud, Director of the Centre de la photographie Genève, about archives and memory.
The session examines how family photographs, field herbarium specimens and layered photographic reconstructions function as repositories of life, methods for processing grief, and instruments of scientific understanding. Pennacchio discusses retracing his mother’s routes and superimposing archival images with new photographs to reconstruct shared memories and reveal the epistemic value of archives.
Swiss artist Virginie Rebetez presents a photographic inquiry into objects associated with death and mourning. Through finely composed photographs and careful re-interpretations of found artefacts, the work examines material cultures surrounding mortality, memory and ritual. The series juxtaposes documentary clarity with subtle conceptual interventions to question how objects encode personal and collective narratives of loss. Developed in dialogue with researchers, the exhibition reveals how scientific and curatorial perspectives reframe everyday objects into sites of reflection and knowledge.
Culture, curated weekly.
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