According to Carl Linnaeus – the father of taxonomy, in his text about the wedding of plants, or plants ‘foreplay’, the Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum (1729), the petals in a flower are the bridal beds and the calyx is the wedding chamber. By counting how many stamens (or “men in a marriage”) and how many pistils (or wives), he invented the Sexual System for the classification of plants, the Systema Naturae (1735), still in use. “Monoandria: A man in a marriage. Diandria, Two men in the same marriage, and so on, until “Polyandria: Twenty men or more in the same bridal chamber with one and the same woman.”

For this series, Maria Fernanda Cardoso has ‘undressed’ a variety of flowers, counted how many ‘wives and husbands’ each have, and then proceeded to photograph them ‘naked’. This series is the newest addition to the collection of the Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO), presented at the last Biennale of Sydney 2012.