Botanica begins with an old understanding of plants: long before botany became a formal science, people learned to distinguish plants as edible, medicinal or poisonous. More than two centuries ago, plants began to be studied for another quality—the substances they secreted, and their potential as raw materials. Formafantasma takes up this forgotten material history as a design resource, asking what an object made from “plastic” might look like if petroleum and industrial production had never defined the material.
The studio investigated natural polymers including rosin, dammar, copal, natural rubber and shellac, alongside the nineteenth-century Bois Durci, made from wood dust and animal blood. Instead of concealing their origins beneath a uniform industrial finish, the objects make the materials’ vegetal and animal qualities visible.
Organic forms, irregular textures and amber-like colours become part of the design language, while wood, ceramic and metal establish a restrained dialogue between materials. The result is a collection that feels simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar—resembling plastic objects while retaining the evidence of their natural sources.
The creativity of Botanica lies in reversing the usual logic of material innovation. Rather than developing a new synthetic substance and imposing a form upon it, Formafantasma begins with materials already capable of transformation and allows their particular qualities to inform the object. Plasticity becomes something tactile, variable and precious rather than smooth and anonymous. The project turns the history of materials into a design method, proposing an alternative visual language for the post-industrial object.
