PALAZZO ZIINO (Via Dante Alighieri, 43, 90141 Palermo PA, Italy)
Mon – Fri 9:30am-6:30pm
June 14 – Sept 28, 2018
In Liberty We Trust is a Gabriella Ciancimino’s solo show presented by the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo and curated by Daniela Bigi and Gianna di Piazza at Palazzo Ziino, Palermo. The show is a Manifesta 12 collaterals event and part of “Palermo- European Capital of Culture”programme.
The exhibition’s point of departure is a reflection that the artist has been carrying forward for some time, combining political thinking and botanical research. At its heart is the symbolic value attributed to endemic plants, which migrate and resist, adapting to different climates and situations.
The inspiration for the entire visual discourse is the figure of Ernesto Basile, who drew the original drapes of Palazzo Ziino when at the end of the nineteenth century the family began to build it. Ciancimino’s encounter with the work of the great architect took place many years ago. She was first interested in the vegetal motifs that innervated the architectures of the famous master of the Sicilian Liberty style and populated their decorative apparatus, then in the botanical iconographies present in his archive, including those of significant endemic plants (such as Dipsacus Sylvestris, from North Africa and present in arid areas, known for its resistance system based on the collection of rain water in its leaves). Finally, the observation shifted to his same graphic ductus, with a dual physiognomy, the fluid but controlled one of the architectural projects and the free one, gestural and broken, of the less known sketches.
This same dialectics can be found in the drawings that populate the walls of the exhibition rooms.
At the same time, the artist studied the plant species that took root on the coasts of Sicily, and her attention focused on those plants that have developed various forms of adaptation, which allows them to live, not only to survive, in saline and arid environments (Aster Tripolium, Lotus commutatus and Calystegia soldanella, and then the famous sea lily, Pancratium Maritimum). Ciancimino associates these plants, a symbol of resistance, with some slogans that become political metaphors. Her aim is to reinterpret the dynamics of mobility, adaptation and coexistence between different cultures and cultivars, putting emphasis both on plant species with high biological resistance and on some political movements of a libertarian nature.
This can be easily seen in one of the wall drawings on show, in which the botanical iconographies are intertwined with Italian, French and American anarchist periodicals found in archives and libraries around the world.
In this exhibition, the great botanical family of resistant plants intertwines with another garden, also with high symbolic potential, the legendary carpet of 65x25m commissioned by the Persian king Khosrow II, known as Spring Garden: “a wonderful carpet, embroidered with emeralds, that the king had stretched out in the hall of his royal palace to remember the joys of spring when the snow and the boredom of winter besieged him.”
Of this carpet, which told the allegory of Good and Bad Government, there is no visual documentation but only the story, considered as a fundamental piece in reconstructing the history of the Mediterranean garden, made of transmission of knowledge and visions from one people to another.
From room to room, the viewers find themselves immersed in a great landscape in which endemic plants, political slogans, iconographies of good governance, decorative patterns of rough materials interweave and investigate different temporalities and geographies, expressing the desire to abandon themselves within a dense jungle wherein they return to experience a primal emotion.
https://www.ciancimino.it/In-Liberty-We-Trust-2018
