Guided by a wandering and contemplative process of observation, Vittoria Mazzonis gathers together various elements—organic and otherwise—that punctuate her path within the Botanical Garden of Turin. Over the past year, the artist has immersed herself in an in-depth exploration of the site and its history, delving into the eighteenth-century institution while engaging with readings that intertwine the vegetal world, philosophy, and science. Through this research, she has examined the ways in which contemporary humans perceive the natural ecosystem.

Multiple layers of meaning and unexpected functions have thus been assigned by the artist to the materials she has collected: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, tiles, hooks, and fragments of human-made structures designed for plants… together forming a record of the lives inhabiting this delimited patch of urban territory. These “inhabitants” or “witnesses” of the habitat itself permeate the artist’s visual imagination; she brings them into dialogue and reunites them in various areas of the Botanical Garden—among sculptural-photographic installations, floating herbaria, an interactive gazebo, and a conceptual map resting on a seedbed table.

Every element composing the four site-specific works—whether of human fabrication or vegetal origin—was found within the grounds of the garden, among its greenhouses and arboretum. In realizing this project, the artist lets instinct guide her, allowing natural contingencies to accompany her in establishing an egalitarian dialogue with the surrounding space and its native beings. Interweaving drawing, words, and classification according to need, Vittoria listens and observes, striving to deconstruct any anthropocentric perspective as much as possible, proposing alternative ways of relating to nature—and thereby awakening the viewer from that state of indifference which marks the modern individual.

The exhibition title carries a double verbal and semantic meaning, starting from the word “Radicati.” On the one hand, Radicàti (rooted) refers to the current human perception of nature—now distant, detached, no longer able to feel or understand the natural environment, to the point of having lost both grounding and identity. The vision of nature as Naturgemälde has crumbled: humanity has become an “other” organism, rather than a part of the natural ecosystem, of a single cosmos. In this sense, the exhibition proposes exercises that aim to shift our gaze in the opposite direction. Here, the second nuance of Ràdicati—as an imperative—comes into play: the artist’s invitation to re-read our relationship with nature and to open new dialogues.