Turin, HABITAT, an exhibition on the topic of networks in our social systems, opens at Simóndi Gallery

HABITAT. The Relational Space of Being is the second edition of Post Scriptum, the format through which Simóndi Gallery opens its exhibition season each September. The group exhibition, curated by the gallery in collaboration with Marguerite Kahrl and on view from Sept. 20 to Nov. 3, explores the visible and invisible networks that surround and connect the living systems of our society, suggesting and promoting strategies and best practices for a more inclusive and relational future vision, pushing us beyond the limits often imposed by the society, space and body we inhabit.

The exhibition HABITAT. The relational space of being is produced in collaboration with the galleries Gian Marco Casini(Livorno), Umberto Di Marino(Naples) and Galerie Nordenhake(Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City). Contributors to this second edition were Karin Fink, geographer and relational designer; Lucy R. Lippard, writer, activist and art author; John Thackara, author and curator; and the cultural association Messy Lab, Ceramic Collective.

This multifaceted exhibition expands the conventional boundaries of ecological art, which really should have no boundaries. Four artists, born in three different countries between 1953 and 1997, have created works that do not simply depict nature’s treasures in their predictable beauty and abundance, nor show their precariousness bordering on extinction. Rather, their works play an active or participatory role in reclaiming the relationship with nature - in situ and local.

The term “relational” - which we also find in the title of the exhibition, HABITAT. The relational space of being - in its broadest meaning is based on the distinction made by Bruno Latour between relational and causal dynamics. In this context, an attempt to transcend dualisms and classifications by blending them together to overcome their limitations, Marguerite Kahrl defines her “relational objects” as artifacts designed to strengthen our connection with the living world, made up of human and non-human actors, by creating works that interact with and influence our relationship with the natural environment and all the entities that comprise it, breaking down conventional barriers between different categories of existence.

Kahrl’s works in the Irrigators series consist of two groups of earthenware vessels, Underground Conversations and Fertility vessels, which recall the “Olla,” ceramic vessels used in the underground irrigation technique of the same name. The funny shapes of his Fertility vessels, reminiscent of hands, paws, claws and nipples, fit as well in a garden as in a gallery. The porous pots are designed to be buried, with colorful necks protruding from the soil. When the potting soil is dry, water flows through the pot to equalize moisture levels, showing what is happening underground and highlighting the lack of fresh water for crop irrigation. “Being hidden”-says the artist-“the soil has remained a mystery for centuries.”

Marguerite Kahrl’s pots have been tested in her neighbors’ vegetable gardens with the goal of “building a sponge of organic matter and a source of moisture,” becoming tools for increasing fertility and reducing soil erosion, as well as counteracting weed growth.

A similar project, in its use of eccentric clay forms, colors and eco-consciousness, is Relational Nests (2021), clay bird houses built as part of the TELL_US artist residency project, promoted by the Messy Lab Cultural Association in collaboration with theTorri Superiore Ecovillage (IM), which saw the active participation of the resident community of the ’ecovillage.

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and social architect, recognized as a mentor by many within the art community. She has collaborated with Kahrl for years, promoting the “exchange of knowledge and practices between holistic and linear thinkers.” Potrč’s work, carried out in different parts of the world, combines in-depth theoretical research with the implementation of collaborative projects that directly engage marginal communities. His Participatory Design has clearly inspired and nurtured the works of all these artists. His diagrammatic Earth Drawings are about “the vital role of indigenous knowledge and practices in the contemporary world .... [in] the formation of an intelligent organism.” The most significant of his recent works, a result of his collaboration with Ooze (2), is a public art project, Future Island (2023), a rock island in Sweden, divided between a northern zone (heated with renewable energy) and an unheated southern zone, bears witness to how flora and fauna adapt to climate change in the years to come. In this living work of art, plants evolve differently in the two zones. Potrč’s work transforms community arts into something more widely applicable, sophisticated and theorized.

Multidisciplinary artist Alessandro Manfrin ’s sound sculpture Quintet (2022) consists of five metal tubes found in his daily wanderings through the city streets, searching for his materials-“fragments of thought that punctuate the city. Objects donated to everyone and belonging to no one, not real waste, suspended in limbo, awaiting judgment.” The tubes are arranged in fluid form. Next to this abstract sculpture, connected by electric cables, is its technological twin - the paraphernalia of the Dolby Surround 5.1 system that animates it, amplifying sounds collected at subway stations. The two dissimilar forms work together to communicate the artist’s message in a particularly contemporary way, which he calls “a kind of organ that brings together the ethereal and the urban.”

Eugenio Tibaldi, Potrč’s other colleague, describes his “temporary landscapes” (of chaotically complex collages, or palimpsests, with their myriad architectural references) as traces of cultural signs necessitated and induced by what power imposes and the economy regulates, the communicative codes that facilitate exchange and alliances between these fabrics in suburban areas. “My work,” Tibaldi says, "is to document and record transformations in the relationship between legality, economy and aesthetics. Tibaldi is something of a nomadic detector of multiple cultures, having worked in such diverse locations as Cairo, Caracas, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Naples, and Thessaloniki.“Walking around the city,” he says, "is like playing at mapping the scars of acceleration. Her work Heidi is based on the late 19th-century novel by Johanna Spyri. Like the novel, it creates a landscape of “remote cultural baggage” set in “a bubble of a non-place like the Swiss mountains,” contrasted with a nearby industrial city.

These four multidisciplinary artists in their layered approaches disrupt stably codified conventions and look to emerging and marginal cultures that, in Potrč’s words, “have survived colonialism and capitalism, and continue to generously share with us knowledge of the land, even where only fragments remain.” They join the growing number of visual artists interacting with ecologies and communities, heirs to the iconic works (in the U.S.) of Agnes Denes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Patricia Johanson, and confronting more recent ones by Future Farmers, Basia Irland, M-12 Studio, Tristan Duke, Aviva Rahmani, Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio, and many others.

Kahrl, Manfrin, Potrč, and Tibaldi demonstrate the role of creativity in different contexts: Manfrin focuses on the urban, Tibaldi on the suburban, Kahrl on the rural and systemic, while Potrč provides analytical overviews and patterns of action. In a sense they are all collagists, cutting and pasting “fragments of thought” -- materials, experiences, beliefs, communities -- to create new realities. What guides them are the things they observe in the world, the things that work, or have worked, or could work, rather than current conventions, often tied to commercial interests.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Simóndi Gallery.

Turin, HABITAT, an exhibition on the topic of networks in our social systems, opens at Simóndi Gallery

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