Brussels Expo.
25 – 27 April 2014
SECTION CURATOR’S VIEW
Landscape as a social system
Michela De Mattei / Margherita Moscardini / Leonid Tsvetkov
Curatorial statement – Lucrezia Cippitelli
In most of the Western world, Nature no longer exists as a physical realm where various types of living entities coexist. What we mostly know as Nature is instead the Landscape, a cultural process of gradual transformation and design of the natural environment, constructed by human structures and societies and in constant transformation.
This transformation of the environment (natural and urban) surrounding human life is by no exception the result of a progressive stratification of events and stories, an intersection of history, culture and consumption. The physical elements of the land and its aspect are a direct aftermath of human activity and conditions: war, crisis, innovation and industry, physical expansion of urban environment, political transformations, ecological adaptation to human interventions.
With their works, Michela De Mattei, Margherita Moscardini and Leonid Tsvetkov analyze this metamorphosis. For them, historical rethinking is indeed the observation of the transformations perceived in the reality of landscape and society. The work of Margherita Moscardini is based on observation of the relationships that exist between vision, architecture and landscape, in search of an image that might represent the present and a critique on the concept of “civilization”. Leonid Tsvetkov is interested in investigating the processes of stratification of landscape by history, initially in random fashion and little by little assuming organized forms. Michela De Mattei analyzes the consonances between human and natural environment, conceptually overlapping inhabited spaces and natura naturata through materials, shape and function.
Process is central in proposed artists’s practices, who make sense of it as a continuous evolution – as continuous is the evolution of the features of the landscape.
Leonid, never uses raw materials but rather products preconceived as cultural refuse from which to draw information on social and physical processes.
Margherita pieces are extensions of spaces that she investigates: her practice transforms the sites she analyzes and becomes an integral part of it.
Michela reconstructs landscapes by decontextualizing tools and techniques developed by humans: she post-produces natural elements suggesting the interdependence between man and nature.