Lucia Veronesi, The Extinct Desinence,
Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
June 21 – October 13 2024
Edited by Paolo Mele and Claudio Zecchi
The ending extinct is a project that was born as a broad reflection on the relationship between the extinction of languages, botany, the history of science in its feminine declinations, and their socio-political implications. Developed through a research phase between London, Trondheim and Zurich, the final result is a work of art composed of a tapestry and a video.
After the exhibition at MOCA London and The Hannah Ryggen Centre, Ørlandet Kultursenter, the project is presented at the Ca’ Pesaro Museum through a modality that intends to explore at the same time the research process and its formalization through the work that enters the collection of museum.
The exhibition is divided into three parts. The internal courtyard of the museum, the entrance hall of the museum and the project room.
The internal courtyard of the museum is transformed for the occasion into a place of research in which the materials, collected by the artist during the months of residence between London, Trondheim and Zurich, and subsequently reworked for publication, explode in the physical space, leaving him spectator enters a dimension that is both discursive and visual.
Here the texts by Jordi Bascompte and Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, by Richard Evans Schultes and the information extracted from Glottolog, the online catalog of languages, linguistic families and dialects from all over the world – among the theoretical references on which the entire project – act as a black and white background for a selection of images that combine the artist’s collages and graphic interventions and which constitute the visual part of the publication published by Marsilio Arte. The selected images refer to some medicinal plants and the endangered languages linked to them, to some botanicals and to Hannah Ryggen, an artist to whom the project is ideally connected. Ryggen was one of the most important Norwegian artists of the twentieth century, who was able to bring together political issues and formal solutions in her tapestries. The complete list of illustrations used to create the visual part of the catalog is also visible.
Finally, the room houses a small archive with the biographies of the women who dealt with botany from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and the complete list of the plants, and their medicinal use, taken into consideration for the project.
In the entrance hall of the Museum, however, the large tapestry combines images and words in a composition that oscillates between the figurative and the abstract. From the forest emerge healing plants coming from the north-east of the Amazon, whose medicinal use risks being canceled and forgotten because it is linked to unique indigenous languages, custodians of that knowledge and in danger of extinction; parts of female bodies, silhouettes of forgotten botanicals, names of plants in indigenous languages, the names of human body systems linked to the use of plants, names of populations at risk of extinction and the names of botanicals. At times the word becomes illegible, disappearing into the background, behind the figures; at times, however, it re-emerges with its full meaning. The tapestry thus becomes a sort of manifesto in which the risk of an enormous loss is made clear, of which humanity is the cause and, perhaps, a possible antidote.
The video, which will be presented on 24 September in the project room, combines archive images, ad hoc shots of the botanical gardens of London and Zurich and the stop motion technique combined with collage. The video is a visionary journey that focuses on some botanicals of the past and their scientific discoveries.
Through the co-presence of image and word, the work recounts the disappearance of medicinal knowledge of plants as a consequence of the disappearance of indigenous languages. Metaphorically, even the plants and their names disappear because no one will be able to recognize them anymore.
The oblivion to which plants are destined is the same into which many botanical plants have fallen, whose stories and scientific discoveries have been forgotten or not recognised. There is a common destiny between pharmaceutical plants and the words that designate them. And the female scientists of the past who have fallen into oblivion are like words, dead seeds to be brought back to life.
