A tale in two voices of surviving wild presences in undeveloped urban and suburban areas, and of the imaginary landscapes that could come out of them.
To tie in with the Eco-existences: forms of the natural and the artificial exhibition (in conjunction with IED Firenze’s Master’s in Curatorial Practice) artist Caterina Sbrana and landscape architect Annalisa Metta will be conducting an exploration of the imagination devoted to undeveloped urban and suburban areas amid lost geographies and new opportunities.
What are the presences that inhabit these areas? What stories do they tell, what visions do they suggest? How do nature and culture, the human and the non-human interact in this “middle earth”? A tale in two voices brings together the sensitivity of an artist who has made the landscape a recurrent theme of her work and the reflections of a scholar who has explored the relationship between mankind, the landscape and architecture in numerous publications. At the end of the encounter, a number of seeds of wild plants from the artist’s collection will be offered as a gift to participants and restored to new landscapes.Activity free of charge while places last.
The activity will be held in the workshops of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
Biographies
Caterina Sbrana (Pisa, 1977) studied restoration at the Istituto di Arti Operative in Perugia and graduated in painting and the visual arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara. She conducts her artistic research in a balance between the use of primordial materials, traditional techniques and a contemporary vision contaminated by technology. Her work, which focuses on the collection of traces, residues and plant textures and the relationship with the landscape, avails itself of various different media such as drawing, painting and ceramic. Organic materials such as poppies are used as tool for tracing out large maps, while earths, carbons and plants are the materials to which she resorts to paint landscapes inspired by digital visions. In recent years her research has extended also to embrace the field of design and the production of objets d’art. She shows her work and collaborates on a regular basis with a number of contemporary art galleries and institutions.
Annalisa Metta (1977) is an associate professor and landscape architect in Roma Tre University’s Architecture Department. Her research addresses theoretical and critical exploration and applied experiments relating to landscape projects with a special focus on public space. She has presented the results of her research at numerous international seminars. Her most recent publications include: Il paesaggio è un mostro. Città selvatiche e nature ibride (DeriveApprodi, 2022), Wild and the Ciy. Landscape architecture for Lush Urbanism (Libria, 2019, with M. L. Olivetti), Coltiviamo il nostro giardino (DeriveApprodi, 2019, with F. Ferran and C. Mattogno), Southward. When Rome will have gone to Tunis (Libria, 2018, with J. Berger); Compresenze. Corpi, azioni e spazi ibridi nella città contemporanea (RomaTre Press, 2017, with G. Caudo and J. Hetman).
Cover illustration: Courtesy the artist
