Some Prefer Nettles (two digital projections) One year’s seed, seven years weed (audio installation), 2006
MLAC, Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, Università di Roma "La Sapienza". 2007
Some Prefer Nettles, plays on the opposition between light and darkness, and prefigures a wide resonant space where the nettle becomes a symbol of the paradox and of the conflict generated from the free movement in the global system. The video-projections of the tridimensional animation that simulates the nettles growth (treated like they were pure shadows), slowly insinuate and occupy the surface of a place, that could be empty or enriched with other presence. In this case, the emptiness is meant as an interstice situated between “crowded spaces”, or better like the distance between the elements of the reality, the area in which they define their relations or connection. The projection negatively illuminates, nicks and invades any surface or limit that is in opposition to it.
The incessant growth of this infesting plant is the matrix for a reflection on survival, on visibility and on free movement. For many people nettles are just a weed, something to get rid of. Coming from Europe, resilient and infesting, nettles have always been employed like medicinal herbs or food. Who hasn’t met at least one time in the childhood those "persistent fuckers" spread out in every corner of the planet?
Some Prefer Nettles does not deal with a threat from alien plants, but of the life that appears on the margin, on the boundaries or on the edges, in the interstices, carrying usually a bad reputation. These resilient nettles that germinate in marginalized spaces despite the efforts put forth to rid of them, provide a strong suggestion to transform, to build in our mind and to cultivate in our culture something that we usually ignore and neglect or we think is not useful.
Sample (mono) from the audio installation