Primat siderais an astrobotanical herbarium created by artist Vincent Fournier at the Domaine des Étangs in spring 2025. It imagines how the site’s flora might have evolved on the fictitious exoplanet Primat sidera.

A herbarium… from elsewhere. What if a fragment of the Domaine des Étangs, hurled into space by a meteorite impact 207 million years ago, had generated a mirror planet? In this new uchronia, Vincent Fournier composes a speculative herbarium in which the Domaine’s plants find their astrobotanical doubles, subjected to other climates, lights and gravities on Primat sidera.

At the crossroads of art and botany, and with the collaboration of Garance Primat and two scientists from the MNHN and CNRS, Marc Jeanson and Jean-Sébastien Steyer, the artist anchors fiction in reality. The book adopts the form of an encyclopedic herbarium, revisited for the present and through the lens of 3D technologies. It combines photographs of unprecedented formal precision – echoing the great naturalist iconographies (from Anna Atkins to Blossfeldt) – with story fragments and notes.

The result is a visual reflection on the possible forms of life, questioning our origins and our bond with biodiversity in a changing world. A singular, visionary book.