The planet breath
Miguel Ausili, Piero Gilardi, Michele Guido, Fabrizio Lucchesi, Mariagrazia Pontorno, Caterina Sbrana, Marco Signorini,Deng Guoyuan, Qiu Yi, Wu Weishan, Xu Qingfeng, Zhang Wei.
curated by Gaia Bindi
conceived and organized by Qiu Yi
22 June/20 July 2023
Accademia dei Georgofili
Florence
The Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence (Logge Uffizi Corti – 50122 Florence, https://www.georgofili.it/ ) with the Association of Contemporary Art and Culture China and Italy (Via Lambertesca n.14, Florence. www.aaccci .it) for the celebrations of the 270th Year of the Georgofili Academy, hosts the exhibition “The breath of the Earth / The Planet Breath” curated by Gaia Bindi, conceived and organized by Qiu Yi, from 22 June to 20 July 2023, which offers 12 contemporary works of art by 12 artists (7 Italian and 5 Chinese), including installation, sculpture, painting, graphics, photography. The exhibition is promoted and organized by the Accademia dei Georgofili and the Association of Contemporary Art and Culture China and Italy, under the patronage of the Tuscany Region, the Municipality of Florence, the Consulate of Chine in Florence, the Chinese National Academy of Arts, the Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence and Shandong University of Arts.
With the title “Il respiro della terra / The Planet Breath” the exhibition deals in different ways withthe theme of nature linked to the Earth as planet, landscape and matter. It starts from the assumption that art is the earth breath and its life, and in a certain sense that only from the creative and ethically correct encounter between nature and culture can surge a viable path for the survival of mankind. As the anthropologist Philippe Descola recalls in his essay Beyond nature and culture (2005): “In greek philosophy, especially in Aristotle, humans are still part of nature. Their destiny is not dissociated from that of an eternal cosmos, and it is precisely because they can access the knowledge of the laws that govern it that they are able to place themselves within it. In order for the nature of the Moderns to come to light, a second purge operation was necessary, it was necessary for humans to become extraneous and superior to nature”. From this sort of “extraneousness” to the natural environment come the problems that we recognize every day in the present Anthropocene era. In response to this, in recent years artists have explored different functions of creativity through new areas of reflection, aiming to rediscover a conscious and correct relationship with the sphere of the living. In fact, art can help to see and inform, making scientific communication pass through direct, sensory and empathic channels. Art can also imagine new environmental/social/economic solutions, creating hypotheses of harmonization between man and nature, cultivating the utopia of a sustainable future, assisting science or agriculture in the orientation of long-term perspectives. We often forget that agriculture, like art, is a human invention. Together, these disciplines can distance those “ideas of nature and culture derived from the model of the industrial factory” – as the activist Vandana Shiva writes in Monocultures of the Mind (1993) – to revise the current course of the planet’s history. From various points of view, the works on display therefore turn their attention to the Earth, developing a multifaceted artistic practice, which tends to identify a poetic culture of global regeneration.