Cultivating utopia, cultivating potential
An artistic project by Andreco
Curated by Giulia Palomba and Maria Paola Zedda
The participative artwork Cultivating Utopia, Cultivating Potentiality is inspired by the readings of Antonio Gramsci’s texts (The Prison Notebooks and Letters from prison), in which sharp reflections on the parallelism between the cultivation of plants and the structure of society emerge.
In his writings, Gramsci imagined new possible worlds for the Southern regions and for the whole humanity.
This scenario of changes arises through the creation of individual and collective ideas, processes and revolutions that could echo on the social dimension and concretely transform the present.
“The fatigue of plants to survive and their response to the current climate changes such as the risk of desertification and drought find a strong consonance with the difficulty of spreading thought within an arid, individualistic society together with the impotence of the repressed revolutionary”. (Andreco)
The Gramsci Garden represents an invitation to closely observe the plants’ strength of growing in adverse conditions, their ability to renounce to parts of themselves in order to save their core and to finally reborn when the first rains come.
This attitude reminds us to the rose of Turi, which Gramsci found burnt, with all the leaves turned black for too much sun: even so it was not dead but it was throwing new gems.
