Lo sguardo selvatico

A book born as a slow pace observation workshop,
alternating between personal and group efforts, experimenting in a non-linear manner. It puts images in order like they were stickers in an album: slowly, one at the time, savouring the blank spaces yet to be filled. 


A botanical garden is the Garden of Gardens, the place where naturalia, artificialia and mirabilia get confounded with each other, becoming a fascinating world on its own.
Invited to an artist-in-residency project at the Orto Botanico di Bologna by Inuit Editions — we tried closing our eyes, taking off our glasses so we could avoid focalising on things, we moved away, we got really close. In botanical gardens the wild nature is tamed and ordered: someone observed carefully on our behalf, establishing standards, geometries, families, sets according to differences and analogies. My eye is the latest of many, it focuses on a plant with a very long story; maybe it sees, maybe it doesn't even observe.


We used and remixed a large set of images taken by Caterina Gabelli in seven Botanical gardens in Europe (Padova, Palermo, Bologna, Grenoble, Brussels, Zurich, Munich) during the last years. 

The texts are polyphonic captions: we asked seven people, all different from a human and professional standpoint, to react to the photos in the attached stickers sheet. They are other sets of eyes, looking upon our view, creating a circular dance between various possible imaginary worlds of what we saw, what we thought we were seeing, or maybe what we just imagined.


Risograph printed by Marco Tavarnesi — Inuit Editions, Bologna 2018.
Photo credits Edoardo Piva.