What can we learn from plants? How can we rethink our relationship with them and the world?
The project “Postnatural gardening. Ecological practices for interspecies care” intends to review the relationships between human cultures and plant worlds, inviting us to shift our anthropocentric gazes on herbs, trees, their flowers and fruits, mushrooms and lichens and to embrace inclusive horizontal visions towards all more-than-human beings, creating interspecies alliances based on empathy. Symbols of resistance, adaptation and coexistence, but also of exploitation and fragility, plants are part of an often unknown universe intimately linked to all forms of life.
The exhibition at MUSE – Science Museum of Trento, conceived in collaboration with the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid and curated by Alice Labor, invites to redefine the narratives surrounding our understanding of “nature” through speculative and imaginative methodologies beyond taxonomies. The creation of a postnatural garden questions the values on which modernity is based to redefine new ways of being in the world through a decolonial perspective that decentralizes humans. Inside the exhibition, a glossary of actions that link us to the world of botany, and give shape to contemporary ecological practices, allows to collectively re-signify concepts and classifications on which the societies of a certain part of the world have been historically founded. Static and moving images bring back fragments of a journey composed of questions, scientific sources, popular narratives, myths, technologies, dreams and intimate stories, based on mutual listening to re-imagine forms of coexistence. The display, conceived as a constellation of concepts, objects, specimens and images, unfolds the intersectionality among different disciplines and their processes, expanding the museum’s narratives also through the videos by Noor Abuarafeh, Seba Calfuqueo and Blanca Gracia.
curated by
Alice Labor
Participating artists:
Noor Abuarafeh, Aterraterra, Seba Calfuqueo, Blanca Gracia, Leandro Listorti, Jumana Manna, Shireen Seno
Contributions by
BAU, Alice Dal Gobbo, Monica Gagliano, Hedera, ife, La Foresta
at MUSE – Museo delle Scienze, Trento
until April 28, 2024