Manifesta 12, the nomad biennale of contemporary art and culture, is opened to the public until the fourth of November in Palermo, where in twenty locations along the city you can visit the work of nearly fifity artists and also collective woks. The widespread system of exhibitions, between installations, videos, performances, urban interventions and literature projects compose ” The Planetary Garden. Cultivate the coexistence ” developed by the creative mediator of Manifesta 12 Bregtje van der Haak, Dutch journalist and filmmaker, Andrés Jaque, Spanish architect and researcher, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, architect born in Sicily and partner of the OMA studio in Rotterdam and Mirjam Varadinis, Swiss curator of visual arts. Founded in 1993by the art historian Hedwig Fijen, that still nowdays direct it, the European nomad biennale promoted by the Municipality of Palermo as an Italian capital city of culture, presents nearly 50 artistic projects of which 35 new artworks made for the occasion not just from artists in the traditional way of the term but also writers, architects and filmmakers invited in the last few months to conduct research in the field and develop new projects working in contact with art producers and local administrations.
The curatorial project of ” The Planetary Garden. Cultivate the coexistence ” starts form the cultural synchronism inherent in the nature, the history and the contemporaneity of Palermo referring to the botanical metaphor of the landscape architect and philosopher Gilles Clément, who relates the world we are living in to a garden of which the man has to take care of. The project is inspired from the artwork “ veduta di Palermo “ of the Sicilian landscape painter Francesco Lo Jacono, exposed in Modern Art Gallery of Palermo, from which you can deduce that none of the natural elements is native, by virtue of the coexistence between different species. The artistic projects are thinked as a critical response to the most urgent problems of the contemporarity, with a special attention to the subject of international mobility and migrant flows.
The Planetary Garden is composed in three sections : ” Garden of Flows ” explores the concept of toxicity, the life of plants an犀利士
d the study of plants in relation with the planet and the global common good, ” Out of Control Room ” has the purpose to give back tangibility to the regime of digital flows , and last, ” City on Stage ” aims to hug the stratified nature of Palermo and encourage a critical comprehension of the different aspects of life in the contemporary city.
