The four-lesson workshop for students, led by Leone Contini – an artist with studies in philosophy and anthropology – and curated by Anna Maiorano, lecturer in Decoration – Environmental Art and Experimental Languages, with the contribution of Flavia Matitti, lecturer in History of Contemporary Art, who gave two lectures on the theme “art and nature”.
And it is precisely nature that is at the centre of Contini’s research. In 2018, he was present at Manifesta 12 with an installation inside the Orto Botanico in Palermo. He has already created several projects that, through performances, installations, lectures, drawings, interventions in public space, videos and texts, investigate the way in which the world of plants, agronomy and botanical sciences, agricultural practice, social systems and the plane of symbols, rituals and traditions relate to each other.
A fruitful encounter, which we took advantage of to investigate some issues relating to the relationship between aesthetics, politics, ecology, landscape and territory. With art becoming a transmutative process, a tool for analysis and a method of symbolic re-elaboration.
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Helga Marsala: In his “Plant Revolution” and in the splendid exhibition recently inaugurated at the Triennale di Milano, Stefano Mancuso offers an intriguing political reading of the “plant system”, associating their particular structure – a collective, sedentary, protean and adaptive intelligence – with the principle of democracy. What do you think of this perspective? Are plants really giving us a key to political and social regeneration, outside an anthropocentric view?
Leone Contini: “If fleas developed rituals, they would do so with dogs” (Wittgenstein). We humans, on the other hand, prefer the plant world to imagine our transformative rituals, including political ones, even to develop visions of the world in which our centrality as a species is reduced. But the anthropocentric perspective will only be fully subverted when plants implement strategies to redefine the hierarchies among living things, as if dogs could finally get rid of Wittgenstein’s fleas.
In short, we consume plants twice, physiologically and symbolically, in addition to the fact that the “representative” use of plant “sap” cuts across ideologies: plant metaphors can (legitimately) serve us to re-imagine forms of radical democracy or to construct boundaries, for example by evoking the invasion of non-native species to justify discrimination on ethnic, cultural or religious grounds.
In one of my case studies, that of Chinese agriculture in Prato, the discriminatory policies implemented against this migrant entrepreneurship continually call into question the protection of the local horticultural heritage from species considered “alien”, as if there were a rural-natural order to be protected (or to which to return), as if the agricultural act were not quintessentially human and therefore cultural.
I too, a poietic flea on the dog’s back, find myself using its hair (the plants) to construct my rituals and my visions of the world.
You work from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective: the study of territories and social relations, traditions, rituals, conflicts, power dynamics, norms and transgressions, the magical/spiritual horizon and the earthly one… All this is found in the landscape and in nature on a symbolic level; but to what extent do the landscape and nature concretely influence the cultural evolution of humankind? And how can art today represent a fusion between these two levels?
The invention of the landscape consists of the identification of a community with a specific territory, which is thus codified and imbued with symbolic value. But the relationship between the dog (the territory) and the fleas (us) is much more problematic, because if the fleas feed on its blood, it is still the quadruped that carries its parasites around, regardless of their will. The act of subjugation that humans imposed on nature 10,000 years ago through agriculture has, at the same time, made them forever slaves to the plant element. The original act of ybris by the first farmer therefore paradoxically placed the human race at the mercy of plants, especially those that he domesticated.
The case of the Great Famine in Ireland, due to the failure of an entire potato production cycle, is an example of how nature, even if genetically subjugated (as in the case of the domesticated potato), can still shape the human world. In my work, I imagine how the generative force of new seeds can revolutionise an asphyxiated society, locked in the sterile reproduction of self-referential monocultural models, including the economic models relating to the production and distribution of food, and I sketch possible future landscapes, currently conceivable but imminent if not already existing, but not yet thematised, such as that of Tosco-Cina, where rows of cypresses border soft hills and lush plantations of cucurbits never seen before.
For Manifesta 12, in the spaces of the Orto Botanico in Palermo, you set up a small experimental garden “for the acclimatisation and cohabitation of migrant varieties”. Migration is a hot topic, often addressed in rhetorical, predictable terms. What is your approach to the subject?
The Irish famine, which caused a huge migration, resulted – despite the million deaths – in the overall genetic success of the local human population, which was able to spread its chromosomes to another continent. It sounds monstrous, but for an alien geneticist, this would be the most immediately “knowable” aspect of that disaster.
In non-rhetorical terms, today’s migration to Europe is simply inevitable, given the demographic boom, widespread war, poverty and environmental devastation that characterise countries with high emigration, in addition to the fact that our economies are in constant search of cheap labour. But here the paranoid rhetoric of the right wing is waving the spectre of ethnic replacement. As symbolic animals, we inevitably construct “rhetorical complexes”, but at this stage, anti-migration narratives are much more flourishing than inclusive ones. It seems to me that the only pro-migrant narrative active in Italy today is the Catholic one.
And it was precisely inclusiveness that fuelled the Palermo project, in contrast to this scenario. How was it structured?
In my work, I sketch alternative narratives of an inclusive nature, just as in the case of “Foreign Farmers”, in Palermo, where I played with the metaphor of new vegetables, more resistant to climate change or pests: I personally experienced this by transforming myself into a “foreign farmer” at the Orto Botanico in Palermo, where the varieties of Bengali, Philippine and Chinese cucurbits, already cultivated in Italy for some years for the use of migrant communities, arrived safe and sound at the end of the Biennale, while the Sicilian cucuzze got lost along the way. From this perspective, multiculturalism is therefore not based on an altruistic acceptance of the other, but on the concrete need for collaboration-encounter between different types of knowledge, in the face of common catastrophes. In other words, in my work I try to avoid pietistic forms of representation of the Other/foreigner as weak and needy; after all, in the mad biosphere we will all be foreigners and the “poetics of otherness” will be a necessity of everyday life.
One of your statements: “I do not believe in a messianic role for art, but the forms of artistic work can trigger – often in a complex and sometimes contradictory way – small but significant subversions of pre-existing power relations and codified narratives”. Are you among those who defend a certain civic-political role for the artist? In what form and in what terms?
I think that in such complex and conflictual times, excluding art from the civic-political sphere is not a neutral gesture, and that it is, on the contrary, dangerously ambiguous, covertly political and tendentially collusive with dominant and regressive demands. The content of an artistic project can also be implicit, in some cases even encrypted (in the event that the artist’s safety is put at risk, for example), but it should never, in my opinion, flaunt neutrality. Art cannot be reduced to messianic-political slogans and pre-packaged recipes to redeem society, but at the same time it should not renounce its transformative potential, in both individual and collective terms. However, we should reflect on specific case studies; speaking in general terms is always very difficult. As far as my work is concerned, the research phase is fundamental: it is here that my ideas enter into dialogue/conflict with those of other individuals, being re-dimensioned, articulated and finally taking concrete forms.
(H.M.)