“The Greeks of the Homeric times believed that kleos – ‘fame’, was composed of songs. Air vibrations contained the extension and the remembrance of a person’s life”.

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors by D.G. Hakell

Kleos is an initiative to collectively explore urban vegetation and perceive its effects over the body (blossoming, aromas, or fruiting), the environment (capture of CO2 or harmful particles) and the culture (migration mapping and the links of species to the place through texts, images, and music) through maps, images and sounds.

In this way, as a cabinet of wonders, the project relates botanical species with scientific, artistic and sound bits that are activated and combined, as users get closer to the plants. An intimate experience that invites us to dive into urban nature to awake the foreign memory of the species surrounding us, remixing traditional music linked to their places of origin.

Therefore, the proposal is conceived as a synaesthetic experience starting in limited gardens to slowly expand, involving citizens in the cartography of new specimens along their daily journeys. This strategy aims at exploring the dimension of the city as a cosmopolitan garden of coexistence through the creation of a collective atlas (Gilles Clément, Donna J. Haraway, Gregory Bateson, Isabelle Stenger, Alexander Von Humboldt, etc.). This does not mean rejecting plans, images or purposes, but rather opening to creative alliances with what already exists. It is our wish to map, celebrate and pollinate the city as a Terra exuberantis.