Transplanting, pruning, planting, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. The incomplete and unnatural silhouettes of the plants resemble cartoonish figures, the city feels like a suspicious backdrop. Plants and trees are stage props. Space is partitioned.
While spontaneous vegetation spreads disillusioned into the crevices, slowly and infinitely expandable, human matter moves swiftly, covered in layers of filaments. Protective armors that further delimit space. The human form is closed, like the garments that contain it. The costume is a protective device.
The act of wearing a garment is a metaphor for inhabiting the city. To occupy the space of the clothing is like occupying a subdivided plot of land.
The costumes are designed by following the forms of vegetation. The subjects are sought in urban centers, geographically diverse. The drawing is partially interpreted and adapted to the material. The antropomorphism of the natural figures inspired the idea for the costume. The works have been created with the aim of dedicating to vegetation a new, inviolable symbolic space.
Anthropomorphism is
the tendency to attribute human characteristics to imaginary, real, natural, and unnatural figures.
Anthropomorphism is
a form of representation capable of masking the history and essence of the subject represented.
Anthropomorphism is a form of appropriation of the subject being represented, capable of altering its very essence.
It was November and the pumpkin was floating in a small canal that runs through the center of Milan, known locally as the Naviglio, one of many that cross the city. It didn’t seem to have been stuck there for long, although a good deal of vegetation had gathered around it. Acquatic plants had wrapped around its round shape, giving it the appearance of a head nestled in fur, while long green strands extended with the current, transforming the vegetable into an anthropomorphic body.
The pumpkin seemed to be in a state of temporary rest, as if waiting to rise on its limbs made of plants. My mind began to imagine its movement: how its steps would look and where it would go. But after imagining it standing up, I realized it would never begin to move, and that it didn’t need me.
I had no story to tell about this character, because it was already telling its own. Its presence was its story. There it was, in the center of Milan, wrapped in thick, spontaneous vegetation. The space it occupied was unstable and temporary. Its stay in that small canal was unpredictable. The only thing I could do was to fix its image in that moment and invent a space where it could remain.
The fact that its appearance resembled a fantastical creature led me to imagine it as a disguise, identifying the space within the costume as a place of permanence. I thought about how a garment can serve as a container for bodies and how it allows us to define portions of space. I designed a custom-made costume for the anthropomorphic pumpkin and looked for fabrics that matched its colors and texture.
It was 2021 and near the Soviet War Memorial, the Sowjetisches Ehrenmal, there was a broken trunk that seemed framed by the landscape. In Treptower Park, orange trees stood around it, watching over it like a group protecting a newborn. The trunk had no leaves and was less than half the height of a full-grown tree. It had a single thin twig that gave it a startled expression, like a gesture, and its broken top resembled a tuft of hair. I took a photograph.
Two years later, in November 2023, when I began working on the Costumes series, the image of that Berlin trunk came back to me. The figure I had glimpsed in that tree was perfect for a new disguise.
I bought brown upholstery velvet and cut out its silhouette. The Berlin tree was now in my studio, empty inside and hanging by its ends, like a piece of meat.
The rosebush stood in a flowerbed in front of the Green Bar, with two crossed stems that looked like legs. Its anthropomorphic shape was visible from only one point of view, from the bus I take every day. I photographed it quickly with my phone, then returned over the following days. In Viale Famagosta, it was exposed to a violent succession of external factors, such as smog, traffic, passersby, road maintenance.
In the months that followed, its silhouette changed completely, the roses had bloomed and then it had been pruned. The two stems had become thin twigs again. They had simply gone back to being. Now it fades into the background.
Meanwhile, its anthropomorphism was impressed in my SD card, then in my computer, and in the costume I sewed. Its space is now enclosed in a shell of faux fur and velvet, inaccessible to change and to other forms of life.
Summer was over and the plant from Tenerife was in the Brera Botanical Garden, in a patch of soil bordered by the visitors’ path. It was isolated from the others of its kind and seemed exhausted. Pushed to the front row with its drooping posture, which didn’t even allow the stem to be seen among its heavy green leaves. A brutal yet auspicious composition, like a breath of fresh reality for a new September.
I used bright green fleece to make its costume and filled it with a metal frame and wadding to recreate the same pose. I assembled leftover pieces of pink polystyrene to build a pedestal tall enough to expose the costume higher than humans.
The first exhibition took place at the opening of a training project dedicated to experimenting with ecological transition. I remember that the sculpture was accidentally dropped at least once by participants.
Parco Sempione is a much-frequented place in Milan, people walk through it and occupy it by lying on the grass. The only untouched areas are the aquatic ones, small streams and artificial ponds scattered throughout the park, inhabited only by a few insects, fish and birds.
From one of these emerged a trunk, partially submerged and softened by moisture, with five broken roots or branches that resembled the fingers of a hand. The water reflected the protruding part, distorting its shape. I imagined it as a large hand, gripping the edge of the pond to pull itself out of the water.
I looked for a dark and shiny fabric to create a large glove. I chose a black velvet with the texture of astrakan, the fur obtained from Karakul lambs, killed for their skin in the first days of life. I filled it with wadding so that it could stand on its own, solid in the middle of the space.
