CONCEPT
Historically forced to lie on artists' tables, ready to accept their destiny as still lifes, with the advance of the anthropocene fruit and vegetables rebel to become active protagonists of the work. In the desire to subvert the Aristotelian definition of man as the only political animal , with this exhibition we implement an exercise in Socratic maieutics aimed at demonstrating that plants also have something to say.
Human behavior towards plant life is characterized by the tendency to identify certain elements of it as enemies to be destroyed and others as friends to prosper. Since the fundamental point of politics is to make a distinction between friends and enemies, we can affirm that both animals and plants are therefore political agents : through chemical and tactile stimuli, they know how to identify their family to which they belong, forge alliances and defend themselves from dangers.
Screenshot - PANE MANIFESTO
Plants are a politicized object and a political subject. They do not passively live our decisions: often they are actually the real protagonists . We design strategic alliances with them, the success of which has determined the survival of both in the most disparate environments. At the same time, this has contributed to the uncontrolled spread of certain species at the expense of others. It thus becomes impossible to distinguish between human politics 'about' plants and plant politics tout-court . Our stories intersect, collide and sometimes mutually reinforce each other. This interchangeability of roles, or rather the inconsistency of such a division, is the true definition of a symbiotic relationship .
What divides us is that the plant world understands the benefits of having humans and animals on their side. Just think of the beauty and scent of flowers to realize how they successfully manipulate us, using admiration to facilitate their own reproduction, as in Jessica Hausner's Little Joe. While we humans, having created the illusion of a contemporaneity of computer science and concrete, we persist in the presumption of governing it, forgetting the mechanisms through which it governs us.