GIOVANNA REPETTO Meridiani

The light has been dimmed

In the language of this commercial environment there are terms such as: production, exposure, light, temperature, exports, aesthetics, standard, rescue, distribution, compression, which are akin to the language of image production.

Each reproduced environment needs care in order to exist. Inside the Mon space, a small warehouse of cut flowers was rebuilt. These flowers underwent a session of acupuncture and moxibustion. The Meridiani performance is a practice of caring about image reproduction. The image here proposed is herbal: the single cut flower which sits at the center of the flower market supply chain.

Meridiani consists in implementing an acupuncture session – an alternative medicine practice based on millenary Chinese models and on the needle, an instrument here transformed into a triggering agent and a vehicle to re-connect the energy flows passing through the body. Acupuncture was initially born as a care-practice for the human body but, in recent decades, has been used in animals and plants as well. The flowers also undergo moxibustion, a practice often associated with acupuncture based on the radiation of heat from the combustion of artemisia vulgaris, a medicinal plant with relaxing properties whose leaves are dried, pressed and pulverized.

Giovanna Repetto – Meridiani

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants: their aesthetics are a source of attraction for many species including man, to the point of pushing him to reproduce them and trade them in places that naturally would not include them, so to admire and smell them also within architectural interiors. These managements are based on the application of studies on post-harvest physiology of flowers, which take the form of agents and methods capable of slowing down the blooming process and of maintaining the beauty of the flower during its export, the long journey it takes before reaching its destination. These trades continuously give life to a new type of ghost landscape, in motion, ephemeral, difficult to map. The resulting landscape is unique, made up of combinations of species brought into contact with each other that in nature, otherwise, would never have met.

Inside the space there is the video Atmosfera n.1 (Cristiano, Francesco, Sandro, Marika, Elvio, Andrea, Raffaella), 2019 which narrates the dynamics  moving this decontextualized landscape through the people who create it and keep it alive. Actions of care that infiltrate and transit within a real landscape, which is also vulnerable due to the effects of climate change.

Meridiani

10-30 June 2022

Giovanna Repetto

Mon View # 2

in collaboration with Sociètè Interludio