Published
Ferran Lega
La petite mort de la menthe
La petite mort de la menthe explores the moment of transition between life and death in a plant, starting from an apparently everyday gesture: cutting a branch. Cutting a sprig to cook, pruning, picking flowers — these acts belong to a utilitarian relationship with the plant world, in which the plant appears mainly as a resource. The work introduces an interruption into that relationship.
The bioelectrical responses of the cut stem are recorded through sensors and an Arduino-based system that converts them into MIDI. The same signals drive the sound and the movements of a robotic arm that holds the plant. The robot does not perform a pre-programmed choreography: it responds to the plant, becoming a kind of kinetic prosthesis that makes visible what the plant cannot express through movement. The resulting dance belongs fully to none of them — plant, electronics or machine. It is a hybrid form produced by their relationship.
The title alludes to the French la petite mort, a euphemism for orgasm that literally means “the little death”: a moment of maximum intensity that is at once a transformation, a momentary loss and a passage between states.
What do we hear when we listen to a plant? The plant itself, or our own technological construction of what we understand as plant activity? The work does not claim that the plant composes music, nor that its signals are a language. It makes the chain of translations — plant, sensor, data, MIDI, movement, sound — part of the aesthetic experience.
The cut is irreversible. From that moment, a kind of technological farewell ritual begins. The signals change, the sound transforms, the robot’s movements shift, and the branch gradually leaves behind the conditions that kept it alive. As it oxidises, the MIDI activity slowly ceases, and more and more silence takes over the soundscape of the room.