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le lieu unique : Mario Del Curto : Humanité Végétale

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The idea for this exhibition was born over ten years ago. After a first work with Mario Del Curto around the notion of “mirror worlds”, personal and most often unusual universes of so-called “Raw” artists, we are working together on a project around utopian gardens: in fact, more than any other environment perhaps, the garden marks the will of the human being to exert its grip on nature. Because the garden is not wilderness as we sometimes believe, but a fabricated, closed and controlled environment. Looking at the garden therefore opened the door to looking at the impact of humans on the natural environment.

It was this door that Mario Del Curto quickly opened, moving away from the initial order to embrace a subject so vast that only a creator with his experience could tackle it.

This question of the garden remains implicit here. Because it is possible to imagine countering the city-nature dichotomy by bringing swathes of greenery in the agglomerations. The gardens respond to the great evils of today: the loss of direct contact with our original environment, the irremediable transformation of our ecosystem, climate change, the reduction of energy resources.

In addition, the garden remains fundamentally utopian because it reproduces a vast world on a manageable scale, manageable. Thus botanical gardens, like that of Nantes, gather on a reduced space specimens which do not cohabit in the wild state, and sometimes come from the four corners of the globe.

Of course, an even greater aspiration guides the Vavilov Institute or the world seed reserve of Svalbard which, in their desires to gather a maximum of species, collect and contain hundreds of thousands of samples, with an encyclopedic vision that can be excessive, even worrying, as a safeguard for part of the living. The shadow of the catastrophe to come hovers there continuously.

In fact, the garden is fundamentally political. The goal of Mario Del Curto is never far from a word of warning – without being moralistic: as Candide had already expressed, the tenacity with which we cultivate our garden, as well as the way we consider the nature, is only transposition of what we do for our environment and the society in which we live.

Today, the photographer’s approach preaches for a salvation that would pass through a double movement: preservation and imagination. The utopia that he offers us, with its gender-specific tension, takes hold of reality and vision for the future, consists in re-considering our relationship between nature and human, by assuming our impact on Earth and by reinvesting the garden in its metaphorical force. More than a temporary escape, it presents a perspective, which even the most disillusioned can feel invested and promising. Because whatever the future holds, we will not  save on action.

Patrick Gyger, Director of le lieu unique

 

The exhibition

Mario Del Curto : Humanité Végétale

Until August 30, 2020

le lieu unique

Centre de culture contemporaine de Nantes

Île de Versailles, Nantes

www.lelieuunique.com

 

The book

Mario Del Curto : Humanité Végétale

The exhibition accompanies the release of the book Humanité Végétale.

Éditions Actes Sud, 2019. 480 pages.

Format 24 x 30 cm.

On sale in bookstores and in exhibitions. € 49.

https://www.actes-sud.fr/

 

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