BIENNALS: Manifesta 12-Palermo,Garden of Flows
Manifesta 12, the European nomadic biennial, presents the work of 50 artists to the public at 20 different venues in Palermo. A network of events including artistic installations, videos, performances, urban actions, and literary projects constitutes “The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence” and has three major axes “Garden of Flows”, “Out of Control Room” and “City on Stage”. In this article we will focus on the projects of “Garden of Flows” in two parts.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Manifesta 12 Archive
The starting point of the curatorial project “The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence” of the Manifesta 12-Palermo is the cultural syncretism inherent in both the natural world and in the past and present of Palermo. Manifesta 12 takes on the botanical metaphor of the garden designer and philosopher Gilles Clément who sees the world we inhabit as a garden to be tended. Garden of Flows: encompasses the stratified nature of Palermo in an attempt to foster a critical understanding of various aspects of the city’s contemporary life and exprores toxicity, plant life and the culture of gardening in relation to the global commons. Alberto Baraya presents “New Herbs from Palermo and Surroundings. A Sicilian Expedition” This herbarium of artificial plants recreates a symbolic collection of flora from Sicily and Palermo. The herbs were gathered during explorations which the artist led in Sicily, with particular attention to the flower offerings left over time on the votive shrines found in urban areas: tributes connected to religious and at times secular devotion made by visitors and communities of different beliefs. The Maria Carolina greenhouse thus becomes a symbolic place where cultures and flowers meet. This display of artificial plants reveals the everyday acts connected to the island’s cultural and religious traditions. Zheng Bo’s video“Pteridophilia” explores the eco-queer movement and its potential. Seven young people walk through a forest in Taiwan, making close contact with ferns. They establish emotional and physical relationships with the plants, relying on their bodies rather than on words. Ferns are very common plants in Taiwan, and are valued by local tribes but were not considered to be valuable by Japanese colonists. Leone Contini’s Installation “Foreign Farmers”, is the result of ten years of collecting seeds and stories has taken shape as an experimental garden where migrating varieties cohabit and are acclimated, set in the Botanical Garden in Palermo. Inspired by the fundamentally hybrid genealogy of Sicilian plants and vegetables, the artist has built a bower in the former colonial section of the Botanical Garden, which was once dedicated to acclimation experiments run on species brought from the colonies. The construction of a hybrid bower upends the historic significance of this space: acclimation is no longer imposed as part of a power-based relationship, but is a natural process. The Sicilian botanist Paolo Boccone (1633-1704) used a particular method to add colour to pressed plants and print them directly onto paper, a procedure known as nature printing. Boccone cultivated special interest for plants containing toxins that could be used in medicine. His research led him to make a Grand Tour of northern Europe, where the majority of his prints are still found. In “Palermo Herbal” Malin Franzén combines Boccone’s nature printing method with modern systems of scientific imaging to depict plants capable of growing alongside toxic substances, such as the reeds or other plants found on the estuary of the Oreto River and in the abandoned park at Acqua dei Corsari in Palermo. Lungiswa Gqunta’s installation “Lituation” seeks to interpret the garden as a stratified space complete with stories, sacred rituals, and memory. Our relationship to the land is tied to exploitative work but also to a sense of transcendence. In her installations, she uses familiar and domestic objects, which, when combined, become weaponry: beer bottles filled with petrol turn into weapons that suggest mobilization and acts of resistance. The installation is composed of glass bottles and unleaded petrol which cover the entire floor of the Gymnasium in the Botanical Garden. “Scenes of Exchange” by Toyin Ojin Odutola is a series of charcoal and pastel drawings describing the presence of West Africa in Italy through episodes of daily life. These intimate scenes highlight and give value to seemingly hidden associations, primarily based on trade, objects, ideas, and travellers through connections that foster exchange, making a tribute to Palermo’s cosmopolitan history. “Scenes of Exchange” offers public and private perspectives through portraits that reveal to us the great potential that can discovered by observing those who are ordinarily misunderstood and ignored. The project “Relocation, Among Other Things” began with Khalil Rabah’s interest in the city’s markets, where objects deriving from different contexts mix together to form a new sense of community. The artist will create a market of various handmade articles, assemblages, and sculptures at the Botanical Garden. Just like the flora of the botanical garden itself, objects from faraway places gather together and are arranged in the space. Like the flora that populates the Botanical Garden, objects and different handmade items, assemblages, and sculptures of similar objects are joined together in the display cases of Padiglione Tineo. Michael Wang’s “The Drowned World” is a work organised as two elements connected to the organic origins and current biological consequences of the phenomenon of industrialisation. A small decorative pool in the Botanical Garden shines with a greenish-blue light. A living monochrome, the pool’s colour is due to cyanobacteria, ancient organisms that were among the first to carry out photosynthesis using chlorophyll. Over two million years ago, their appearance launched the biological process through which light and air can transform into organic material. This process released substantial quantities of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere for the first time. As it was toxic for almost every form of life that had developed to that point, atmospheric oxygen caused the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. A forest, composed of plants closely related to those that existed in the Carboniferous Period, grows among the industrial ruins of an old gasometer. These plants once formed the enormous swamps that stretched across the entire planet. Over the centuries, their buried remains gave shape to the coal used in that very gasometer. When heated and burned, this coal re-releases the air that was captured more than 300 million years ago, thus restoring a primordial atmosphere. The installation “A Proposal of Syncretism (This Time Without Genocide” by Maria Theresa Alvez, aims to convey the complexity and stratification of cultural exchanges. Using the centuries-old maiolica technique, the artist created a panel in which all the elements depicted, such as fruit, vegetables, and trees considered emblematic of the Sicilian landscape, are not native to the area: the prickly pear and agave from Mexico, tomatoes and potatoes from the Andes, and Jacaranda and Ceiba speciosa trees from Brazil form a new syncretism. The project began with some tiles found at the stalls of the Piazza Marina market depicting exotic Brazilian parrots: fragments of an ornamental motif that is rather common in Palermo, known as “birds of paradise”, they depict exotic and local birds ordinarily portrayed on plaques made to celebrate the construction of a stately home. Melanie Bonajo’s “Night Soil Trilogy” is an experimental documentary in three parts that shows how most of the Western population feels strongly disconnected from nature. Through a semi-documentary approach, Melanie Bonjao explores in depth how people live with a sense of fragmentation and estrangement. The figures in her film are searching for new rituals, for a different relationship with nature and a reconfiguration of the concepts connected to gender issues in an attempt to resist the tremendous sense of emptiness that pervades them; not infrequently, their search leads them to follow alternative lifestyles, at times engaging in antisocial or illegal dynamics. Segments of a semi-documentary nature alternate with hallucinatory fragments that emerge from Bonajo’s imagination. These last images result from her intense collaboration with the main characters, most of whom are women.
Info: Organizers: Manifesta Amsterdam and Il Comune di Palermo, Various venues, Palermo, Duration: 16/11-4/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00 With the exception of: Chiesa di Santa Maria dello Spasimo (Tue-Sat 9:30-18:00) and Volpe Astuta (Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00), http://m12.manifesta.org
