TURIN, Italy — In 1902, Russian naturalist, zoologist, and anarchist Piotr Kropotkin revealed a treatise titled Mutual Assist: 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, vegetation, and human communities he had noticed in his travels to locations like Siberia, cooperating and collaborating to outlive and evolve in life’s struggles, relatively than competing for assets.
Kropotkin’s concepts of symbiotic creation had been a conceptual place to begin for the exhibition Mutual Assist: 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 example 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 dwelling in a Guatemala rainforest for nature to change. Suter surrenders her sole authorship to the traces of climate and animals, together with her canine. Right here, the works look like jaunty welcome banners.
Giuseppe Penone, “Alpi Marittime” (Maritime Alps) (1973), two shade 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 Sixties famously positioned a bronze solid of his personal hand into an ash tree; through the years, 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 an analogous 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” challenge she executed for many years, starting within the Nineteen Seventies) in addition to documentation of her basic reforestation challenge “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 gaggle 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 creative impact: French artist Hubert Duprat provides caddisfly larvae, who construct tiny protecting tubes when in pure waters, with minuscule gems 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 rather 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 primarily based on the chunk 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 way of the humid air, alighting on invasive, toxic vegetation anchored in fertile earth. Alongside the trail by way of this climate-controlled ecosystem is an outsized, furry animatronic toy bear that at the beginning seems to be sleeping, then from time to time 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 is able to proceed to evolve, metabolize, or decay over the course of the present’s run, maybe making a number 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 complete — 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 remains to be primarily based on human manipulations of or interventions into pure processes — among 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 number of years again. In one of many discursive occasions connected to his 2020 residency there, a query arose on the current art-institutional give attention to 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 Assist is price seeing to soak up 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 considering that Darwin’s previous concepts have soundly triumphed over Kropotkin’s fin de siecle declarations and desires. We have now not but reached the purpose at which homo sapiens has the capability to really honor concepts of “fostering care,” as acknowledged within the exhibition supplies (and “care” appears like an art-world trope that peaked a number of years in the past) — in artwork, and positively not in the actual world beneath present circumstances. Even within the context of this present, human dominance goes robust. A minimum of 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), blended 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 Assist: Artwork in Collaboration with Nature continues on the Castello di Rivoli (Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Turin, Italy) by way of March 23. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio.
Editor’s Observe, 2/26/2025: Some journey for the writer was paid for by Castello di Rivoli and Pinacoteca Agnelli.
