Il giardino libernautico. Curated by Elena Bellantoni in collaboration with Niccolò Giacomazzi and Benedetta Monti. With Sara Basta, John Cascone, Grossi Maglioni, and Jacopo Natoli. 06.15 – 09.30.2022

With the exhibition “Il giardino libernautico” Fondazione Baruchello inaugurates the sixth edition of the Summer Show project, organized with Estate Romana. After the success of 2021 edition, Fondazione Baruchello again invited an artist, for this edition Elena Bellantoni, to conceive and curate an exhibition project.

“Il giardino libernautico”, curated in collaboration with Niccolò Giacomazzi and Benedetta Monti, invited by the artist, is a collective exhibition that develops around issues that are increasingly urgent to consider: the relationship with nature, the landscape and the care as responsible action towards the ecosystem.

The project starts from the direct confrontation with Fondazione Baruchello’s projects and in particular with Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., the long action that undertook Gianfranco Baruchello from 1973 to 1981 and with his book Io sono un albero (Arsial, 2000), in which the artist refers with these words to the garden of Fondazione Baruchello that once house the Agricola Cornelia: “I was delivering my own brain, feelings, to this garden-space. Seeing oneself grow like grass, like trees or bushes was a process of total identification: the mind went out and I observed it as a silent but attentive witness” (Baruchello).

The artists Sara Basta, John Cascone, the duo Grossi Maglioni and Jacopo Natoli met in a preparatory phase of the exhibition, between April and May, with the garden, the forest and the external spaces of Fondazione Baruchello in via di Santa Cornelia in various appointments and residences, comparing ideas, hypotheses, solicitations. As the curator Elena Bellantoni explains: “All these artists use the body as a tool for interacting with space, the performative element is a constant in their research through relational and participatory actions. The procedural dimension was the methodology that constituted the main element for making the libernautic garden grow. The game, the nonsense, the free association were the keys to start running on this lawn, on this mental surface”. The title of the exhibition, in fact, comes from a game played between curators and artists which involved the assembly of syllables and fragments of words: thus the word “liber – nautical” was born.
The artists return the results of their research to the exhibition, with the production of unpublished works and site-specific, created starting right from the residence in the spaces and garden of Fondazione Baruchello.
The libernauts are the artists who have faced this journey into a heterotopia: the garden represents a key element for reading the relationship with space, to understand man’s ability to create and recreate his own spaces, a place in which nature and culture fully express their dissonance or consonance. The garden therefore as a place of sharing, through which to read the aesthetic tradition but also the way in which other cultures relate to space.

During the opening day, Fondazione hosted a performance related to John Cascone’s work: a group of performers experienced the effects of Xeniaformae by feigning a slight drowsiness caused by prolonged observation of the plants.

A Public Program of meetings accompanied the exhibition project.

The Summer Show project, promoted by Roma Culture, is the winner of the Estate Romana 2020-2021-2022 curated by the Dipartimento Attività Culturali and is carried out in collaboration with SIAE.