Sustainability and nature lie at the heart of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The exhibition The Butterfly Affect explores artistic practices that investigate the field of botany and explore the political, social and economic contradictions of our societies.
Curated by Irene Calderoni and Bernardo Follini, the group show interrogates the relationship between human and plant bodies, revealing their close interconnection, and challenging the paradigms established by colonial extractivism and medical taxonomy.
Spanning video, sculpture, installation and painting, the exhibition looks at plants and herbal knowledge as a terrain of conflict between powers and subjectivities, but also practices of care, pleasure and ecology.
Artists will include Patricia Domínguez, Sharona Franklin, Ja’Tovia Gary, Lungiswa Gqunta, Sebastiano Impellizzeri, Isaac Julien, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jumana Manna, Jota Mombaça, Zoe Williams and Rachel Youn.
The artists traverse the natural sciences, with a particular interest in botany, as terrains of conflict governed by dynamics of exploitation and oppression. The themes of vulnerability and health and explored starting from herbal knowledge, bringing out the processes of medicalization of the body and stigmatization of illness.
Affection and relationships are expanded in a trans-human perspective that blurs the boundaries between sexual bodies and vegetable bodies. Finally, ecological destruction is read in connection to the trauma engraved on the bodies of different communities, allowing the artists to imagine spaces for new practices of collective healing.
Press release from Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
