Flowers of Peace and Hope: a reflection held within a single pressed flower
I spend a lot of my time in museums.
Paris is, I think, home to more museums than almost any other city in the world. Whether it’s a temporary exhibition or a permanent collection, really looking, taking it in, takes real energy and focus.
And afterward, I have another small pleasure: wandering through the museum shop.
Some might dismiss these as mere trinkets, but every so often you come across something genuinely well made, even a little unexpected.
At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, I once found the most curiously designed long gloves and jewelry. And this year, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cairo, I couldn’t stop smiling at a bar of soap shaped like hieroglyphs.
It was through these wanderings that I found myself quietly developing a project of my own: Fleurs de Paix et d’Espoir (Flowers of Peace and Hope). I’m currently proposing this concept to museum boutiques with a meaningful historical and cultural mission.
A single pressed flower can hold within it a much larger story.
Since 2023, I’ve been incorporating pressed flowers into my photographic work. Then, in 2026, a visit to the Temples of Isis and Abu Simbel in Egypt became a turning point.
These temples were saved from being submerged, thanks to a UNESCO-led preservation campaign in the 1960s.
Among those who supported that effort was Jacqueline Kennedy.
Of the countless outfits she was photographed in over the years, the one that has stayed with me most vividly is the red suit she wore while standing before the television cameras, guiding the nation through her famous White House Tour.
That deep red seemed to echo a single rose, quiet and resolute.
Flowers have told other stories, too.
In 1967, during a protest in Washington, a young woman — Jan Rose Kasmir — stepped forward and offered a single flower to a line of soldiers holding rifles. The moment was captured by French photographer Marc Riboud, in a photograph now widely known as The Ultimate Confrontation (you can view the original photograph on the Magnum Photos website). The pattern of her coat, it’s said, seemed to echo the very color of that flower. Weapon and flower, confrontation and stillness — a contrast that remains, even now, an enduring symbol of peace.
Gandhi, too, comes to mind as someone who embodied nonviolence, often pictured with a flower in hand.
And Marie Curie, who broke ground in the study of radiation while never losing her quiet composure. Across different eras and borders, women and men alike have each, in their own way, embodied a kind of quiet strength.
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To hold that historical memory in something as small as a pressed flower, and offer it as a card, that is the thought at the heart of this project.
Each of these cards is, in a sense, a likeness of the great figures who gave something to humanity, their quiet, upright bearing expressed through the form of a flower.
In the museum shop, a place where we so often pause without quite meaning to, I hope that when a card like this passes into someone’s hands, both the weight of history and the quiet stillness of the flower might gently reach them, too.
Written by Momi
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