March-August 2024
Underground. Ecosistemi da esplorare
Museu Civico Villa dei Cedri
Bellinzona, Switzerland
group show curated by Carole Haensler and Joana P.R. Neves

The project comprises of two interventions, one indoors and another outdoors. In the exhibition room, a slide projector shows images of microscopic analysis we have done to the soils found both in the museum's garden and the local surrounding forests.

In the sequence of images, one could notice that shapes and forms at different scales become abstracted from their context whilst verbal annotations and diagrams gain increasing aesthetic prevalence. A bacterially-formed micro-aggregate, or a fungal strand could become lines as much as diagramatic links between names so are. Information of different kinds was shown in different colours, from black for technical and scientificly precise notes, to red for politically and sociologically motivated commentaries and interpretations.

The room also contained a light box, with a collection of large format films, showing full size images of the fieldwork we had to do preceeding each microscopic analysis. A dialogue ensued between our own hands digging down into the different soils and the different plant communities inhabiting those places.

In the garden, right at the main entrance to the museum, the other intervention was a small nursery reserved for the growth of bushes, shrubs and trees which we realized positively increase the biodiversity of the garden. Since the museum's garden is an historical heritage one, the design cannot be edited, so the trees were then donated to the city of Bellinzona and will when the right time comes be transplanted into public green spaces under the supervision of the municipality's head gardner.

Many narratives took place in the development of this work, but one in particular called for our attention; and that is of the ambiguous relationship, which the fungus Armilaria mellea develops with trees and the whole ecossystem at large. Armillaria is a very well known wood rotting pathogen in forestry and horticultyre worldwid, and is therefore feared by many tree lovers and institutions holding public gardens. Opon analysing several samples in this biome, however, is that armillaria, is not just a pathogen, and is indded not a bad agent in the system at all. It serves many functions which are crutial to complex and developd forest-based ecossystems and its relationships to many different species are much more nuanced than generally perceived.

We derived some political considerations about these types of unseen behaviours and played parallels between the human and non human worlds, at micro and macro scales.