Landscape as a living archive
A landscape preserves stories. Traces of the past can be found in buildings, trees, paths and the soil. The artists of Threading Landscapes read the landscape as a living archive, bringing hidden stories and memories back to light.
Other artists approach landscape itself as a bearer of history.
- In Hear Her Calendar System A Year of Thirteen Months (2025) by Bianca Baldi, a sycamore fig tree in Ethiopia becomes a silent witness to colonial and ecological history. A photograph taken by her grandfather in 1939 during the Italian occupation forms the starting point for a work about alternative ways of understanding time and memory.
- In Live Feed (2019), Rossella Biscotti examines the Western fascination with so-called ‘corpse flowers’. Behind these botanical spectacles emerge stories of classification, colonial circulation, scientific knowledge and the movement of species and information.
- Pierre Huyghe presents Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). In an abandoned restaurant in the evacuation zone around Fukushima, a masked, trained monkey moves through a landscape in which human structures have disappeared, while other forms of life continue. Human and animal, nature and culture, autonomy and conditioning become increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.
- American artist Meg Webster, a pioneer of ecological art, presents the highly elemental intervention Sand Circle(1980). A circle of sand becomes at once an image of concentration, geological time and continuous change. Every movement, touch or shift in humidity can alter its form once again.
