Earthrise. Ecological Visions
on Both Sides of the Wall
2019, curated by Marco Scotini
239 pp., Italian/English, Archive Books, Berlin; € 20,00 – ISBN 978-3-943620-97-9
Through our editorial and exhibition project we have tried to reinsert the ecologist discourse within its brief history: using a minor genealogy, concerning the pioneers of the relationship between art and the environment in the 1970s, in Europe, both on one and the other side of the Iron Curtain. The reason for this choice is not only because that was the moment when the shift of ecology from the field of the natural sciences to that of civil society took place, becoming one of the new fulcrums of popular attention thanks to the environmentalist movement. It is rather because students and workers, the personal and the political, imagination and struggle, the body and living labour, feminism and environmentalism, the real and the possible, were all equally called upon in the open conflicts of 1968, setting up a militancy that was as one with the forms of life.
Texts by: 9999, Gianfranco Baruchello, Enrico Bonanate, Orietta Brombin, Valeria Ceregini, Antonio D’Avossa, Maja Fowkes, Piero Gilardi, Caterina Iaquinta, Petra K. Kelly, Henry Martin, Marco Ornella, Daniela Palazzoli, Marko Pogačnik, Marco Scotini, Ettore Sottsass, Elvira Vannini.
You can buy the book directly in the museum or on the website archivebooks.org
GROW IT YOURSELF
2016, curated by Marco Scotini
208 pp., Italian/English, Archive Books, Berlin; € 20,00 – ISBN 978-3-943620-29-0
“In 2013 I wrote on this same annual diary-book that the community art practices of ecological art had a macropolitical meaning because they corroborated the formation of a new solidarity and conscious subjectivity in the face of the so-called environmental suicide towards which the dominant neoliberal social system he is carrying.
Today the events of geopolitics oppress us even more with a thunderous sequence of negative and destructive events: from endemic wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America to the bubbles of financial speculation, from the increase of global warming to the virulent growth of the extraction of fossil substances with the catastrophic fracking method.
In the debates on the problems of the world economy the awareness is growing that there will be no real exit from the crisis and the same regime economists are starting to talk about a “secular stagnation” This model of civilization founded on infinite growth has worked only for a restricted and privileged part of humanity, but has already reached its limits in the spoliation and poisoning of the biosphere and, even before, in the deprivation of the means of subsistence and in the enslavement of labor for most of mankind, as the gigantic migratory flows in progress testify eloquently.
The artists who have worked and who will operate in the future with symbolic methods, online and offline, warmly participatory, generate the most stimulating inputs for the liberation of a new and ecosystemic collective subjectivity, aimed at managing the transition to a fair and biocoerent society . ”
Piero Gilardi
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COMMONS ART
2014, curated by Claudio Cravero
120 pp., Italian/English , Prinp Editore, Torino; € 12,00 – ISBN 978-88-97677-54-3
Art is in fact a common good. And this because through it places and people build identities, strengthen the link with the history to which they belong and the present they live. The experiences of Bioart help us develop awareness and generate new practices of shared living. The common good, if so conceived, can therefore only start from the bottom, from that new democracy that finds its foundation in ecological society. In this way, we start towards an education for the future and the activation of concrete processes of socio-cultural transformation. The theme was thus declined through workshops and exhibitions. Show Food, lab-show about food themes, curated by Orietta Brombin; Sic vos non vobis – Per voi ma non vostra, group show curated by Claudio Cravero about water themes and tensions between public good and privatization Vegetation as a political agent, group show curated by Marco Scotini, that investigates how in the current biopolitical conditions vegetation returns to have a great role within the forms of social construction. The themes were addressed through exhibitions and workshops with: Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Michel Blazy, Amilcar Cabral, Andrea Caretto | Raffaella Spagna, Filipa César, Critical Art Ensemble, Brigitte de Malau, Emory Douglas, Frame Works Collective, Fernando García-Dory, Piero Gilardi, Daniel Halter, Adelita Husni-Bey, Bukta Imre, Norma Jeane, Emmanuel Louisgrand, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Claire Pentecost, Marjetica Potrč, Géraldine Py | Roberto Verde, Joe Quercia, RozO, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Marie Velardi, Ali Zaidi
Text by: Orietta Brombin, Rosanna Caramiello, Gianluca Cosmacini, Claudio Cravero, Piero Gilardi, Marco Scotini.
You can buy the book directly in the museum and on the website prinp.com
INTERNATURALITÀ / INTERNATURALISM
2013, curated by Claudio Cravero
120 pp., Italian/English, Prinp Editore, Torino; € 12,00 – ISBN 978-88-97677-28-4
The plurality of looks towards nature leads to the examination of the concept ofInternaturalità (Gianfranco Marrone, Addio alla Natura, Feltrinelli 2011). In the debate on the environment, one wonders, for example, whether nature is an instrumental object for man; or if, on the other hand, it can not become a subject with which to relate to other living forms. The lexical multiplicity that invests the idea of nature, and which in the contemporary is almost forced to cohabit especially in the debate between different cultures, requires more and more of its conjugation. On the overcoming of the dichotomy between nature and culture – since the discourse on nature is in the first instance already a cultural product – the French anthropologist and ethnographer Philippe Descola reasons for example through two new possible categories: the human and non human (Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, 2005). These are dualisms which exclude precise ethnographic grids and which confirm the presence of infinite nature-culture. These narratives were presented at the PAV through exhibitions and workshops with: botto&bruno, Critical Art Ensemble, Andrea Caretto|Raffaella Spagna, Gabriella Ciancimino, Brigitte de Malau, Agostino Ferrari, Piero Gilardi, Henrik Hakansson, Norma Jeane, Laurent Le Deunff, Filippo Leonardi, Mja Mahdaoui, Lucy+Jorge Orta, Luana Perilli, Cesare Pietroiusti, Christophe Quirino Spoto, Laura Viale, Uli Westphal.
Documented with photographs and drawings, the volume includes essays written by: Orietta Brombin, Gianluca Cosmacini, Claudio Cravero, Piero Gilardi.
You can buy the book directly in the museum and on the website prinp.com
INTERNATURALISM
Documents of international study conference (Turin, May 8, 2013)
2013, curated by Claudio Cravero
148 pp., Italian, Prinp Editore, Torino, ISBN 978-88-97677-33-8, e-book version
The volume includes documentations and essays of the international conference that accompanied the opening of the exhibition Internaturalità, held at Casa del Teatro Ragazzi in Turin on May 8, 2013. The conference analyzed a series of panorama (aesthetic, ethical, anthropological and artistic) around nature. Organized in three sessions, with contributions from specialists and researchers from different disciplines, the conference offered food for thought on some of the most current and urgent questions about the environment, a concept that has always been ambiguous and a source of lexical equivocality. In Aesthetics and Ethics of Nature, we asked ourselves about the actual existence of an aesthetics and an ethics of nature and landscape at the moment when environmental balance appears to be increasingly compromised. In the second section Anthropology and Human Culture the interventions of specialists from the so-called “human culture” and “zoo-anthropology” fields alternated, questioning whether nature could really become a subject with which to relate to other living forms, and if so in what ways. The third and last section Art and narratives of nature, has explored some forms of “story” of nature suggested by contemporary art. These are ways that are capable of approaching urgent environmental problems (from the loss of biodiversity to global warming), leading us to imagine what it means to experience them in the first person.
Text by: Bergit Arends, Alice Benessia, Maurizio Balistreri, Andrea Caretto e Raffaella Spagna, Claudio Cravero, Piergiorgio Donatelli, Salvatore D’Onofrio, Piero Gilardi, Roberto Marchesini, Maurizio Mori, Mario Petrucci, Fabien Sanders, Gilberte Tsai, Alessio Vaccari.
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PIERO GILARDI The artist and the man in the world
2013, curated by Claudio Cravero
65 pp., Italian/English, Prinp Editore, Torino, ISBN 978-88-97677-18-5
Piero Gilardi The artist and the man in the world collects and documents the works made by the Turin artist in the last five years (2008-2013), starting from the birth of the PAV. The works produced in this period of time, from Aiguestortes to Tiktaalik, Ipogea and Climate Change, they mainly analyze the biosphere and many of the current problems connected to it. These are works that trigger – with playful elements in a participatory key – a reflection about the increasingly frequent ecological catastrophes to which humanity and species living are subjected. And finally, they become works that take on an essential role as narrative vectors of social ties and understanding of the world around us. In this perspective, his work is analyzed by placing Gilardi as “man and artist in the world”. The publication contains essays by Claudio Cravero and Orietta Brombin, with a preface by the artist.
You can buy the book directly in the museum and on the website prinp.com
ETHOS DEL VIVENTE
2012, curated by Claudio Cravero
120 pp., Italian/English, € 9,50
The biosphere is among the subjects told in many of the narratives of contemporary art, but also in cinema, literature and, not least, in music. All the narrations, however, in addition to telling the planet, leave open a question about our way of living the world we live in. How can we relate to it and take care of it? What is the difference between the world as a house or a mere shell? “Biophilia” term (the same chosen, among other things, by Björk in the title of his last album) seems to open horizons of meaning. And this is the “propensity to focus on life forms and anything that reminds it with a feeling of empathy” – as defined by the American entomologist Edward O. Wilson in 1984. But it is precisely from the widespread and shared sense of discomfort and impotence in being able to live “in harmony and balance with nature” – an instance dear to deep ecology – that the publication Ethos del Vivente discusses the narrative possibilities of art (presented at PAV by the Critical Art Ensemble, Etienne de France, Ettore Favini, Piero Gilardi, Green ON, He-He, Norma Jeane, Diego Scroppo, Collective Terra Terra and Seçil Yaylali) in creating visions that have a relevance to the change of look and perception towards the environment.
Documented with photographs and drawings, the volume includes essays written by: Piero Gilardi, Orietta Brombin, Annick Bureaud, Gianluca Cosmacini, Claudio Cravero, Stefania Crobe, Luca Pinciaroli .
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PAESAGGI DEL CORPO-AMBIENTE
2011, curated by Claudio Cravero
128 pp., Italian/English, € 9,50, Eventi e progetti Editore, Biella – ISBN 978-88-89280-95-6
Nature (environmental and body, to be protected and rethought, common good, unstable and difficult to share) is the object of the interventions and reflections of the PAV Art Program 2011. The uncertainty and precariousness of the relationship between man and nature to be found in the direct relationship with the environment, as well as with respect to one’s own image of man, trace through the testimonies of the artists a sort of new history of the body. The interventions of Marta de Menezes, Dario Neira, Evgen Bavcar, Eduardo Kac and Andrea Polli create a plot of meaning, where each work is a narrative that reveals how the body is in fact united with the rest of the living by virtue of the common organic component .
Documented with photographs and drawings, the volume includes essays written by: Piero Gilardi, Gaia Bindi, Orietta Brombin, Angelo Candiano, Claudio Cravero, Giulio Lughi, Valentina Salati .
You can buy the book directly in the museum or to this link
PRAETER NATURAM
Brandon Ballengée
2011, curated by Claudio Cravero
64 pp., Italian/English, € 9,00, Eventi e progetti Editore, Biella – ISBN 978-88-89280-89-8
Ballengée’s research blurs the boundaries between a disciplinary field and the other between art, science and ecology. His work can be included in the fusion of biological research, environmental activism and aesthetic processing, and his works are the result of several procedural stages starting from the Eco-Actions. Although the focus of his practice is the study of amphibians, fish, insects and birds, Ballengée translates direct experience with nature into questions about the alarming ecological changes and the malformations of some animal species. Praeter naturam is the monographic book that testifies the entire journey led by Ballengée to the PAV of Turin in 2010.
Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes essays written by the artist Piero Gilardi; Jens Hauser, curator and media specialist at the University of Ruhr, Bochum (D); Claudio Cravero, PAV curator; Orietta Brombin, head of PAV Educational and Training Activities; Franco Andreone, herpetologist at the Regional Museum of Natural Sciences in Turin and member of the IUCN / Amphibian Specialist Group; and Beatrice Mautino, biotechnologist and science communicator.
You can buy the book directly in the museum or to this link
PARCO PARK PARC
Art and territories of urban resilience
2010 , curated by Claudio Cravero
144 pp., Italian/English, € 15,00 , Eventi e progetti Editore, Biella – ISBN 978-88-89280-86-7
With the declension in multiple languages of the word “park”, the three languages used by the artists who collaborated with the PAV in 2010 and in previous years, the publication intends to investigate the relationship between work of art and the environment through careful reflection on some contemporary practices and poetics. Issues often translated into interrogative form as they pose new questions about the position we occupy in being and being in the world. In fact, the questions do not seem to correspond to real answers, but rather to other questions generated by different looks and visions, those that in the end the artists – always – offer with their own points of view. The PAV is not just a container, but – through art – is the set of territories of urban resilience.
Text by: Gaia Bindi, Orietta Brombin, Laura Cantarella, Gianluca Cosmacini, Claudio Cravero, Piero Gilardi, Emanuela Romano, Valentina Salati, Alessandra Sandrolini, Lorenzo Taiuti .
You can buy the book directly in the museum or to this link
G.O. Growing Out
Evolution of a moving park
2009, curated by Claudio Cravero
128 pp., Italian/English, € 15,00, Eventi e progetti Editore, Biella – ISBN 978-88-89280-76-8
The book retraces with texts, images and interviews with the artists the 2009 activities of PAV – Parco Arte Vivente in Turin. (Village Green and Greenhouse), Growing Out Interactive museum in the nature, in its first year the PAV is confirmed – through exhibitions, workshops and laboratories – as an incubator of widespread ecological awareness. Growing Out is a wish for everything that comes from the earth and takes shape from it Evolving itself naturally and artistically, like the park’s own installations, the PAV is included in the possible future cultural evolution on the broader social and training plan, at the same time constituting a model of behavioral development towards the environment.
Texts by: Gaia Bindi, Orietta Brombin, Claudio Cravero, Piero Gilardi, Emanuela Romano, Valentina Salati .
You can buy the book directly in the museum or to this link.
ECOSOFT ART
A moving park
2006/2008 , curated by Claudio Cravero
96 pp., Italian/English, € 15,00, Eventi e progetti Editore, Biella – ISBN 978-88-89280-53-9
The catalog intends to reflect – through contributions from different disciplinary fields (art, architecture, anthropology and biology) – on the roads traveled and on the possible developments of the park, from its design genesis to the hypotheses about the future. Ecosoft Art it comes in silence, soft indeed, both for the nature of the experiments that were hosted in the years of prefiguration of the park and for the lightness of some materials – organic and inorganic – used by the artists involved (Piero Gilardi, Michel Blazy, Enrica Borghi, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Francesco Mariotti). The volume is divided, almost like a piece of music, into Preludi, Arrivals and Visions, three precise acts that articulate a narrative. And it becomes the very echo of the PAV, that is the sound return of a park in movement that, with its chorality, represents all the questions that art, science and new disciplines pose to nature, to what its borders live , pulsates or simply happens.
Texts by: Orietta Brombin, Giuseppe Camerini, Gianluca Cosmacini, Claudio Cravero, Piero Gilardi, Valentina Salati.
You can buy the book directly in the museum or to this link
From Land Art to Bioart
Documents of international study conference (Turin, January 20, 2007)
2008, curated by Ivana Mulatero
396 pp., Italian/English, € 23,00, Edizioni Hopeful Monster, Torino – ISBN 978-88-7757-227-1
This volume contains the proceedings of the International Study Conference From Land Art to BioArt held on January 20, 2007 at the Conference Hall of the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. The conference was promoted by ACPAV Association, PAV managaer institution, in collaboration with Fondazione Torino Musei and Assessorato alla Cultura della Città di Torino.
For the first time in Italy, art historians, artists, new media experts, bioethics, zooanthropologists, biologists, art park managers, landscape architects, biotechnology and specialists in teaching applied to art and science have met to discuss the aesthetic results of the movement Art in Nature, area ofEsthétique relationnelle, “genetic” vein of the art of new media and at the same time the open and active experimentation of Bioart and ecological art.
The theoretical problems, historicized or in progress, of each of these artistic strands are part of the theoretical dialectic of the PAV Art Program, which is explicitly placed within the framework of post-humanistic thought. A thought that has overcome Cartesian dualisms, substantialist and anthropocentric positions, to investigate the relationship with the otherness of the human being, understood anthropologically as a temporary and transitory set in the cosmological process of coevolution, well expressed in the intervention in a conference of Piero Gilardi. The results of the conference are not, however, a point of arrival, but only the initial moment for a research and a systematic action aimed at developing the cultural identity and the socio-educational setting of the PAV, pilot project of “interactive museum” in nature “as defined during the long implementation process from 2002 to today.
Texts by: Jean-Max Albert, Louis Bec, Alfio Bonanno, Nicolas Bourriaud, Pier Luigi Capucci, Andrea Caretto & Raffaella Spagna, Gianluca Cosmacini, François Curlet, Marika De Acetis, Claude Faure, Piero Gilardi, Jens Hauser, Roberto Marchesini, Ivana Mulatero, Lorenzo Taiuti, Tea Taramino, Franco Torriani.
You can buy the book directly in the museum