Flora Renaissance: How Enea’s Landscape Installation Accelerates Biodiversity Awareness at Art Basel
Eva Mai
Each year, Art Basel brings together not only artists and galleries, but also partners who help reimagine the spaces of the fair in surprising and inspiring ways. Among them is Enea Landscape Architecture, Official Partner of the Swiss edition of the show, whose collaboration with Art Basel has transformed the Rundhof of Hall 2 into a living encounter between art and nature. In the warm courtyard, Enea has created a soothing microclimate: trees provide natural shade, improve air quality, and ensure pleasant temperatures. With Flora Renaissance, their 2025 installation, Enea invited fair visitors into a landscape that both celebrates and challenges our relationship with the natural world.
Over the past decades, Swiss orchard meadows - once characteristic of the Swiss plateau - have steadily declined, along with the biodiversity they supported. In response, Enea reinterpreted this landscape typology for a contemporary context, bringing together fruit trees, complementary species and meadow plants to form a cohesive, living ecosystem. The installation offered visitors an idea of how such landscapes can strengthen resilience, support biodiversity and remain deeply aesthetic at the same time. The installation made tangible what can otherwise remain abstract: how landscapes evolve, what is lost when biodiversity declines, and how thoughtfully designed environments can help restore ecological balance.
Just as importantly, Enea ensured that the installation lived on beyond the fair. All elements - from soil and furniture to trees and perennials - returned to the Enea Tree Museum’s nursery or found new life in private garden projects, extending the impact of the work across communities. Herbs and vegetables cultivated for the installation were shared within the Enea community, reinforcing a philosophy of regeneration.
For Art Basel and the MCH Group, Flora Renaissance exemplifies the Accelerate dimension of the DARE sustainability framework: using our platforms to amplify partners who bring environmental expertise, creative thinking and tangible action into the cultural sphere. Enea installation showed how partnerships can spark broader conversations around biodiversity, climate resilience and sustainable land use by placing these themes within an artistic experience that invites curiosity and engagement.
