Ritorno alla natura [A return to nature]
Environmental engineer and visual artist Andreco on the way back to nature as a hybrid mind
Thank you for being here! The third edition of the Atlas newsletter brings you inside “The Design of Return” podcast third episode, where I interview environmental engineer and visual artist Andrea Conte, in art Andreco. This episode is recorded in Italian. Someday, with your support, we will work on seeking professional translators to make all Italian episodes available in English and all English episodes available in Italian. Subscribe below to help us get there. In the meantime, here are some key highlights from our conversation and additional resources on the episode themes in #thelibraryoftransit section.
Welcome back. I am so happy you are here.
About Ben and ecological empathy
Can we understand our relationship with nature starting from the plants we have at home?
Before summer, I brought our apartment plant to a plant nursery in Milan.
As I entered, I stepped into lush vegetation in recovery. A table hosting the smallest pots, a large lamp hovering on top of the tallest. Every corner was covered with plants labeled with the name of the caretaker who brought them in.
“These are the semi-retired ones,” the lady at the greenery told me as she walked me towards the corner of the orchids.
“Only half of these will recover. They are difficult to save.”
Ours is a Ficus, we call him “Ben.”
We picked him up at our friends’ apartment as they were about to move out.
It belonged to my friend who was hired to take my place when I quit my executive job in California a few years prior and moved back home to Italy.
She had moved to Milan from Australia, where she was from. It was now her time to quit the same job and transfer back to her homeland.
Ben is both an ex-pat plant and a token of return from a past life to another life. He carries all signs of displacement and transition.
His newest leaves are at the bottom. The regeneration of roots happening faster than the growth of his own body. Two thin branches that didn’t have the time to grow fully before moving again are falling on themselves, attempting to spur new blossoms. His most luminous green leaves are at the top, always catching the light somewhere else, aiming at a fictitious forest that never settles to exist. A couple of yellow leaves hanging loose and inanimate, the dead parts he carries with him.
As a tree, Ben wouldn’t have moved anywhere at all.
His roots would have helped him form habits, and grow across seasons organically, with no external life support other than what was already there: nutrients from the terrain, water from the sky, offerings to the birds, falling with the autumn wind, flourishing at the first ray of light in the spring.
I put Ben on the floor and filled in some form, releasing the greenery from the responsibility of something happening to him there in the three weeks we were away.
“Does he sit in the sunlight at home?”
I am a newbie as a plant caretaker, but I was fast to tell her he didn’t, because a friend told me his kind didn’t need direct sunlight. My friend specializes in helping plant owners take care of them in the transition from their natural habitat to human spaces.
She is someone who has become a guide for me when I decided to take Ben home.
I realized I was keen on giving the lady the idea that I was not only a responsible owner, but I was also invested in being something more for him, like a parent, or a member of his family.
[light]
“You know Naples is full of Ficus trees that live in direct sunlight.”
She continued.
“I am not telling you this because there is a right or a wrong. I just want to know what habits you gave him. If he lived in the dark until now, it’s important to gradually expose him to the sunlight, otherwise, he burns out”.
Ben was living in a hallway with no windows when we got him. He looked like a very old man, with his back hunched and a wrinkled body. Now his habitat was a wall where the sun didn’t hit directly.
At the idea of his leaves incinerating in the sun, I realized the only thing standing between Ben and him burning out, was me and my desire to decorate my home.
That this kind of entrapped, potted, displaced nature has a cycle, but no agency left.
I was the agent and the interrupter of that cycle of water, soil, and light. Maybe I was even trying to redeem myself for how much we are at fault in the larger scale of things, by caring for a plant that wouldn’t have needed my help in the wild.
[soil]
“The soil we deposit in their vase is not enough. In the natural world, it takes its nutrients from other animals decomposing or defecating. So, when that isn’t available, we have to provide it for them.”
I was getting ready to put him on a summer cycle of earthworm hummus at the suggestion of my friend.
“Ok then, we will do that here then.”
She reassured me.
I am not a mother, but that’s the closest I have got to exchanging recipes for your baby with another mum.
How fast are we to believe that plants need us the same way a child needs a parent, without recognizing how complex and complete they already are.
[water]
The same thing happens with water. Every time I watered Ben, it didn’t even occur to me he might not need the same type of water I need.
“Put a bucket out on the balcony when it rains. Or fill up a tank of tap water, but let it simmer overnight so the chlorine evaporates, before giving it to him.”
I paid my ten euros deposit and walked my way through these small plantations of resting beings towards the exit. Outside, traffic was moving fast and I jumped on a tram to make my way home.
I started to think about how much autonomy we have removed from nature, and how many skills we have yet to train to care for it the right way.
Taking care of Ben as a survivor of displacement put an urgent pin in my brain: would we be able to care for nature, for how far it seems from us, in the same amount we care for Ben, whom we have under our eyes every day in our living rooms?
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This tension between being human and returning to nature as something we are part of, not something we dominate, is what we explore in our third episode of the Design of Return podcast.
I interview Andrea Conte, in art Andreco, whose work is the one of an alchemist.
He is an environmental engineer, a scientist, a visual artist, a nomad who returned home. His work revolves around a practice called “Nature as Art”, a contemporary Art practice deeply rooted in science, aiming at tributing all invisible chemical and biological processes existing in nature. He is what I call a “land whisperer,” someone helping us communicate with nature by giving it a voice we often struggle to hear.
With his site-specific installations and public performances in his Climate Art Project (www.climateartproject.com,) he is on a mission to make Climate Change a visible force by transforming the invisible and often mysterious scientific data around it in public art.
In our interview, Andrea gave me a framework to understand the impact art could have on our awareness of nature and climate change that I have never heard of before.
He speaks about his work as being inspired by what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “Hyper-object.” That Climate Change is a hyper-object, a topic so vast and intimidating, it is something we keep at bay because ultimately, it is conceived as unapproachable and too far from us. Andrea’s work in using art as a language (“art is useless”) aims at translating this unconceivable object in a symbolic language that gets to us faster, helping us change perspective on nature as something we have proximity with. Not something far away we can’t understand, and therefore control.
His contribution is about moving from an anthropocentric view to an ecocentric one.
His work has been showcased at Biennale di Architettura in Venice, Triennale in Milano, Saatchi Gallery in Londra, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, Macro in Roma. He collaborates with CNR, NASA, Columbia University, the University of Bologna, and the Sapienza University in Rome.
After many years working internationally, he is now dedicated to doing his work at home in Rome. A lot of it is focused on the river Aniene and Tevere, two familiar water streams that traverse the whole city and represent the epicenter of people’s lives.
So that “if people don’t want to think about how the glaciers are melting, they are faster to care about the river under their feet. Art helps them install the belief climate change is not a ‘hyper-object,’ that’s not too far and too inconceivable.”
In our conversation, Andrea tells us about many journeys of return: the one from two separate identities to one multi-disciplinary self, the one to nature, and the one to Italy after living abroad for fourteen years.
The episode is in Italian. Here are some key highlights of our conversation in English. You can download the entire script of the episode here and find additional resources on the episode’s themes in #thelibraryoftransit below.
Home is where you hang your hat
Donatella Caggiano: What is home and what does the idea of home mean to you?
Andrea Conte: A place where to hang your hat? I moved around with everything I had for a long time, changing place every two years for work. My home was widespread. At some point, I felt the need to have a base, a place where my books, my projects could stay. And then travel for shorter journeys to come back home faster.
The hybrid profession as a necessity
Donatella Caggiano: In your career, you managed to be an alchemist and do what many aspire to, which is to fully integrate two talents, two identities, the one of the environmental engineer and the one of the visual artist. What was the first thing that helped you kick off this career?
Andrea Conte: It was a slow and long juxtaposing of two research. I had been a painter my whole life. I have always painted and draw. My grandparents were painters. As a kid, my parents constantly lost me wandering in museums. I can say I had been an artist before I was an engineer. I decided to pick up science because I had a passion for physics and knew I could not learn that by myself, on my own in a room. So, I had my life as an engineer specialized in Green Infrastructure and nature-based solution, working nine to five — most of the times, nine to after dinner really — and then come home and paint. Until it took over me and became a necessity I could not live without. I kept asking myself, why do I still feel this pull, this necessity to do art? Until sleeping two hours per night became unmanageable and so I quit. I was twenty–six, I had a nice, stable job as a site director, but I decided to become a researcher because that gave me more time to dedicate to my art.
I had two names at the time. Andrea Conte was the engineer, Andreco was my artist alter ego. But nobody knew. I started noticing that while there were many people who could do good work as scientists in my field, there were not enough artists working on it. As I started doing my first exhibitions, I noticed how much more impact, how many more people my message could reach as an artist instead of a scientist at a convention, until I got caught.
Donatella Caggiano: How did you get “caught”? And what were you afraid of back then?
Andrea Conte: There is a bias against artists in the science world. If you are an engineer, you are someone in charge of people’s safety. People expect a certain “serious” profile from you, while the artist is seen as someone who is not reliable. I had to go through a proper coming out. Come out to the science world, letting them know I was an artist. And coming out to the art world letting them know I was a scientist.
Until 2010 I didn’t have any photographs of me online. It would have been confusing to have a portrait out there captioned with Andrea Conte and another with Andreco until I moved to New York for a research project at Columbia University. I was in two research groups about the value of green roofs to benefit the climate in the city of New York. Every day, I would work uptown and then come down to my studio in Brooklyn and work on my art.
I had an exhibition in the Lower East Side when my research director, Patricia Callaghan, the vice–dean at Columbia, called me up in the office on a Wednesday and sat me down, asking me if I had an art exhibition going on. I was petrified and scared of losing my job. Instead, she said, “This is wonderful. Everybody claims to be a multidisciplinary person, you really are doing this work, so why do you hide it?” She encouraged me to create a single portfolio. And when I moved back to Italy, that’s exactly what I did. I combined both disciplines under one practice and never looked back.
Donatella Caggiano: As I was researching your story, I came across The Chronicles of Transit by Paul Beatriz Preciado. He underwent a transition from Beatriz to Paul, from woman to man, and speaks about how much time he spent “in-between” and how at some point he was “so tired of fluidity, he needed a change,” which is a powerful paradox. Do you see yourself in the same paradox?
Andrea Conte: Fluidity is interesting to me. This idea of breaking silos and definitions, of staying somewhere in-between, is the work I am interested in keeping up. What happened to me is that I got tired of hiding one identity or the other at some point, so I strived to do work as a whole character, combining both.
Frontiers are an invention, the soil has no frontiers
Donatella Caggiano: You lived in many parts of the world: Spain, Galles, Brazil, Portugal, the United States. Do you believe there is a link between how much you have traveled and the research of your identity?
Andrea Conte: Absolutely. I believe traveling is what helps you get rid of prejudices and biases. I don’t feel like I have a national identity. I am more of an internationalist. I feel connected to everyone on the planet; it doesn’t matter where they are. I have always been in awe of how much talking about climate change can unite us under one common inter-nation.
Donatella Caggiano: I love that, not having a “national” identity. How does the idea of soil and frontiers play out in your work?
Andrea Conte: This is very present in my work. In a project called One and Only, I worked on the north frontier of the Alps, in Udine, on the idea that nations cannot separate a mountain. I created a flag featuring the mountain as the unifier between two nations and planted it at the peak. For three months, the national flag was put down, and the mountain became the only flag. The message was that even when there is no continuity geographically, I see a political continuity within the soil and between what we artificially called nations. And it is first and foremost a message of solidarity to leave no man behind.
I am very inspired by the work of the French anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus, who spent his life tracing and mapping the north African frontiers until he became a luminaire. When he was invited back to France, he refused his nationality because he had traveled and seen so much that the idea of a nation was inconceivable to him.
Return as proximity
Donatella Caggiano: In your work, you tell us a lot about plants and their ability to adapt and about the role of the artist to bring you somewhere else. You have both physically and in your work left for this somewhere else, and then returned home. What happened to you when you replanted yourself in your motherland?
Andrea Conte: Plants cannot move. And the fact that they are forced to stay is what caused them to become adaptable. Humans can move. And that’s what forced them to adapt. I believe in what Gramsci called “intellettuale organico” [organic intellectual], someone who learns through a lifelong experience and not in a room full of books.
For me, this experience lasted fourteen years abroad. I came back because I realized I had done work anywhere else in the world, except where I was born. I was called by the idea of entering the cultural conversation in my city, Rome, and help make an impact here on the ecosystem’s health. Also, my parents are starting to get old, so I wanted to be as close as possible now, after many years of seeing each other for such a short time.
The idea of proximity is important to me now. In Rome, I am focusing my work on the ecological health of rivers, like Tevere and Aniene. Only after working on neighborhoods you can bring the conversation to a global level. Real change can occur only after people have realized climate change happens in the river next door and not only on a glacier.
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#thelibraryoftransit: read, watch, learn
To learn more about Andreco and his work visit www.andreco.org and www.climateartproject.com. If you are interested in partecipating to his live performances, follow Andreco on Instagram and facebook.
Philosopher Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects explores our understanding about climate change as an “hyperoject,” an entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place and challenges our philosophical habits of thoughts around it.
Anarchist geographer and political theorist Élisée Reclus’ writings in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus are great to explore his achievement recounting the story of earth and humanity as an epochal struggle between freedom and domination. Reclus was also a radical feminist, antiracist, ecologist, animal rights advocate, cultural radical, nudist, and vegetarian.
Italian “organic intellectual”, marxist philosopher, writer, and politician Antonio Gramsci creates a memorable parallel between the construction of society and the cultivation of plants in his Lettere dal carcere [Letters from prison]. A selection of Gramsci’s letters was the inspiration for Andreco’s work Cultivating utopia, cultivating potential in collaboration with Campo Sud in Sardinia, Antonio Gramci’s homeland, in 2017. In addition to the letters, Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. They are considered one of the most original contributions to political theory. English translation of his prison writing can be found in Prison Notebooks: a Selection.
As an expert at mastering the hybrid, fleeting edge of transit, in his bold and transgressive book An Apartment on Uranus, the writer, curator, and philosopher Paul B. Preciado recounts his transformation from Beatriz to Paul B., and examines other processes of political, cultural, and sexual transition. In the book, he reflects on a variety of socio-political issues, including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the criminalization of migrants, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role artists and museums might play in the writing of a new social contract.
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