TURIN, Italy — In 1902, Russian naturalist, zoologist, and anarchist Piotr Kropotkin printed a treatise titled Mutual Support: A Issue of Evolution, which (to drastically simplify) turns Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” notion on its head. Kropotkin outlines examples of animals, crops, and human communities he had noticed in his travels to locations like Siberia, cooperating and collaborating to outlive and evolve in life’s struggles, quite than competing for sources.
Kropotkin’s concepts of symbiotic creation have been a conceptual place to begin for the exhibition Mutual Support: Artwork in Collaboration with Nature at Castello di Rivoli. The curators — the Castello’s new director, Francesco Manacorda, and Marianna Vecellio — selected works by greater than 20 artists and their many nonhuman collaborators for instance how co-creation can unfold between human and nonhuman creatures (the latter duly listed by species on the artist register; Lumbricus terrestris or Nerium oleander are simply two examples).
The longitudinal choreography of the exhibition, situated within the Castello’s Manica Lunga, an elongated architectural construction constructed within the first half of the sixteenth century, opens with Argentina-born artist Vivian Suter’s frameless, large-scale canvases suspended from the ceiling. Her work are colourful abstracts that she leaves exterior her house in a Guatemala rainforest for nature to switch. Suter surrenders her sole authorship to the traces of climate and animals, together with her canines. Right here, the works appear to be jaunty welcome banners.
Giuseppe Penone, “Alpi Marittime” (Maritime Alps) (1973), two coloration images, metal hand, version of 25 (photograph © Alain Chudeau)
Close by, two groupings of artworks look again to the early days of conceptual nature-artist interactions, beginning with Turin-based Giuseppe Penone, who within the Nineteen Sixties famously positioned a bronze solid of his personal hand into an ash tree; over time, the tree grew across the intervention, which he titled “Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto” or “It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point” (1968–2003). On this present we see the same piece with a walnut tree. Seminal land artist Agnes Denes additionally makes an look, with images of bushes chained collectively (a part of the “Rice/Tree/Burial” venture she executed for many years, starting within the Seventies) in addition to documentation of her traditional reforestation venture “Tree Mountain: A Living Capsule,” began in 1982. For this work, 11,000 people every planted a tree in a spiral formation on a artifical mountain in Finland.
A bunch of spiderwebs dusted with graphic powder are attributed to Argentina-born Tomas Saraceno, together with the various species of arachnids he retains in his studio in Berlin. Because the exhibition unfolds, viewers see different organisms nudged by human intervention into doing what they usually do, to inventive impact: French artist Hubert Duprat provides caddisfly larvae, who construct tiny protecting tubes when in pure waters, with minuscule gem stones and bits of gold; right here, they’ve created stunningly lovely little jewels. Renato Leotta offers underwater plankton the chance to take unintentional self-portraits by tracing their actions in ocean water with photosensitive paper.
Yiannis Maniatakos, “Untitled” (2007), oil on canvas (courtesy the Property of Yiannis Maniatakos and Sylvia Kouvali London / Piraeus)
There’s far more, together with Yiannis Maniatakos’s work made underwater within the Aegean; Nour Mobarak’s polyphonic myceleum sculptures; Michel Blazy’s “Le lâcher d’escargots” (The snail launch, 2009), an outsized carpet hugging wall and ground and adorned with deliciously curvy white slime trails created by slow-moving snails; and Aki Inomata’s vertical sculptures based mostly on the chew patterns of Eurasian beavers — when copied by a sculptor and tripled in dimension, the water mammals’ works vaguely echo Brancusi’s lexicon of shapes. The present ends in a literal hothouse: Valuable Okomoyon’s “The sun eats her children” (2023) is an overheated tropical biotope. Unique black butterflies float by means of the humid air, alighting on invasive, toxic crops anchored in fertile earth. Alongside the trail by means of this climate-controlled ecosystem is an outsized, furry animatronic toy bear that in the first place seems to be sleeping, then occasionally opens its synthetic eyes and lets out a shriek.
Retracing my steps, I used to be struck by the optimism inherent in artwork rising from interspecies collaborations, a few of which can proceed to evolve, metabolize, or decay over the course of the present’s run, maybe making a couple of of those items a brand new type of time-based artwork. However as intriguing because the present’s premises are, the various works don’t add as much as a very cohesive entire — though it’s unclear whether or not that was ever the purpose. These of us who frequent mega-exhibitions have seen a few of these artworks earlier than, by Okomoyon, Saraceno, and others. And are they actually collaborations? The vast majority of this artwork continues to be based mostly on human manipulations of or interventions into pure processes — a number of the “aid” right here feels, to place it into political phrases, far much less reciprocal than nonconsensual. I used to be reminded of the work of Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo that was exhibited at Gropius Bau in Berlin a couple of years again. In one of many discursive occasions connected to his 2020 residency there, a query arose on the latest art-institutional concentrate on the “more-than-human”: “Why do we think a human cultural institution should cater to nonhuman species? Maybe they would tell us they don’t care, or maybe the earth would say ‘get this building off me.’”
Mutual Support is value seeing to absorb the vary of human/nature collaborations that so many wonderful artists have conjured — that is apparently the primary institutional present to assemble solely collaborative human/nonhuman works — or to ponder the longer term potentials of such cooperation. However I got here away pondering that Darwin’s previous concepts have soundly triumphed over Kropotkin’s fin de siecle declarations and desires. Now we have not but reached the purpose at which homo sapiens has the capability to actually honor concepts of “fostering care,” as said within the exhibition supplies (and “care” appears like an art-world trope that peaked a couple of years in the past) — in artwork, and definitely not in the true world underneath present circumstances. Even within the context of this present, human dominance goes robust. No less than for now.
Nour Mobarak, “Apollo Copy” (2023), mycelium, wooden, plaster (courtesy the artist and Sylvia Kouvali, London / Piraeus)
Aki Inomata, “How to Carve a Sculpture” (2018–ongoing), set up view, Roppongi Crossing 2022 (photograph Eisuke Asaoka)
Vivian Suter, “Untitled” (n.d.) (dettaglio /element), combined media on canvas (photograph, Filippo Ferrares, courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery)
Maria Thereza Alves, “The Council of Beings” (2023) (photograph Nick Ash, courtesy Martins & Montero Gallery)
Set up view of Michel Blazy, “Le lâcher d’escargots” (2009) (photograph Andrea Guermani, courtesy Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino)
Set up view of Bianca Bondi & Guillaume Bouisset, “Source and Origin, Lecce Stone” (2024) (photograph Andrea Guermani, courtesy Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino)
Mutual Support: Artwork in Collaboration with Nature continues on the Castello di Rivoli (Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Turin, Italy) by means of March 23. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio.
Editor’s Be aware, 2/26/2025: Some journey for the creator was paid for by Castello di Rivoli and Pinacoteca Agnelli.
