"Dad, will Mom come back in spring, like the flowers do?"
Francesco Pennacchio was three years old when he asked this question, the spring following the disappearance of his mother, Emmanuela. This childhood anecdote, both sweet and tragic, is the spark that drives Pennacchio to embark on a long journey.

He begins by creating a dialogue between the exploration of family photographic archives and the uninterrupted cycles of the natural world. He then retraces his mother's steps in the places she visited in Europe, posing in the same locations and superimposing the archival photographs with the new work to reconstruct shared memories and create an anachronistic meeting point between himself and his mother. The journey culminates in the Geneva Botanic Garden herbarium, where the collected specimens have been removed from their renewal cycle and become biodiversity documents and archives.

It is this journey, recounted in the photo book " Unlike Flowers " that Francesco Pennacchio will discuss with the institution’s scientists. Two seemingly very different perspectives—that of family life and that of science—can nevertheless reveal the value of archives and memory as a method of knowledge, of processing grief, and of scientific understanding.