At the “Castello di Rivoli”, the works of twenty artists, located in over forty years of art history, tell the possible, effective collaboration between man and nature
Until March 23, 2025
Rivoli (Turin)
Art, mediator of peace and sharing between human beings and the natural world. This is the principle (and hope) that underlies the great review “Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature”hosted, until Sunday 23 March next year, in the “Manica Lunga” of “Rivoli Castle”. First exhibition curated by the new director, Francesco Manacordain collaboration with Marianna Vecelliothe exhibition aims to explore the concept of “mutual support” (as per the title) and the possible creative collaboration between “human beings” e “nature”through the concrete proposal of suggestive, “improbable” (yet real) experiences of around twenty artists and their “non-human collaborators” who have addressed the topic from the 1960s to today. The theses contained in the essay inspire the exhibition “Mutual support. A factor of evolution” of the Russian “libertarian” philosopher Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), who, unlike the disciples of “social Darwinism” (justifying the oppression of the stronger over the weaker), supported human and animal life “be predominantly based on cooperation and solidarity rather than on struggle”.
Line of thought that we find fully applied in the Rivoli exhibition. Starting from the imposing ones “tele” Of Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949) twirling in the void of the “Manica Lunga” to show all the wounds and deep traces, which have become pictorial ciphers, left by the beating tropical rains and the marks made by the “careless” and repeated passage of the animals. Works that challenge the “concept of authorship” exclusively human. “The exposure – he underlines Francesco Manacorda – drawing on different exhibition languages such as video, painting, sound, installation and sculpture, it explores visions that seek new ways of collaboration with other species, transforming the ‘Manica Lunga’ of the ‘Castle’ into a ‘living’ organism ‘where works and natural processes cooperate in the creation of a real living exhibition”. Nature creates and offers research stimuli to the artist. Theirs is a work carried out in full collaboration. Where the hand and mind of man positively welcome suggestions, caress them, denounce them, compose and recompose them in the imaginative actuality of works on which it is obligatory to stop and reflect with shared attention. Here then Aki Inomata (Japan, 1983) draw inspiration from the methods of building dams typical of Eurasian beavers, creating wooden sculptures by hand and with an automatic cutting machine following shapes similar to those produced by the tenacious semi-aquatic rodents.
Among the great “pioneers” of “Land Art”, we then find Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, 1947) who exhibited the works of the series in Rivoli “Maritime Alps”including the powerful sculpture “Holding 24 years of growth”where the artistic intervention on a walnut tree trunk magnificently merges human and natural processes of strong intensity into one body. And mutual exchange. Which comes to a head in that“No releasing snails” environmental installation (2009) in which Michel Blazy (Monaco, 1966) involves “snails” that travel along a carpet leaving trails that recall the intersections of abstract painting. Snails and lizards, butterflies and flowers and insects. Everything collaborates in the artistic reconstruction of a “Creation” to be preserved. And the list of artists engaged in this sort of “miraculous” prophetic mission thickens with names gravitating within the ambit of an artistic, but also political-social avant-garde (“Land” and “Pop Art”) in which we find figures more or less historical from Hungarian Agnes Denes to the Argentine Tomas Saraceno and Brazilian style Maria Thereza Alves up to the Egyptian Nour Mubarak with plastic works where the mycelium of a common mushroom with a thousand colors transforms the sculptures into living organisms “that change, decompose and recompose”.
And the process continues, from Turin Renato Leotta all’americano Robert Smithson (just to name a few) until concluding with the work (2023) “The sun eats her children” Of Precious Okoyomon (London, 1993), in which a tropical greenhouse welcomes butterflies and poisonous plants in a polychrome landscape that is decidedly surreal and dreamlike. Always with a view to “mutual collaboration”! Which not only produces ingenious pages of art, but which also travels carefully not to betray that “nature”, not in a Leopardian “stepmother” way, but exhausted and annoyed (yes!) by the continuous unacceptable human abuses.
Gianni Milani
“Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature”
Rivoli Castle, Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Rivoli (Turin); tel.011/9565222 or www.castellodirivoli.org
Until March 23, 2025
Hours: from Wed. on Fri. 10/17; Sat. Sun. and holidays 11/18
In the photos: Aky Inomata “How to Carve a Sculpture”, 2018 (ph. Eisuke Asaoka); Giuseppe Penone “Holding 24 years of growth”, bronze, 2020; Michel Blazy “Le lâcher d’escargots”, snails and brown carpet, 2009; Precious Okoyomon “The sun eats her children”, flowers, volcanic earth, butterflies, resin bear sculpture, 2023
Read the latest news here: THE TORINESE
