OUR PERSONAL NATURE (IT)

A community-generated portrait about our relationship with the ecology of
Fontecchio, Abruzzo, Italy and the surrounding area


project overview | exhibition | workshops | participant photos | participant booklets | video | info & people

Participant Photos
Participants were asked to take pictures of plants or animals that they knew something about, or found interesting. They were also asked to look for iamges of "nature" and places where plants or animals have merged with the built environment.

Andrea Testa
Debora Panaccione
Erick Cuevas
Francesca Racano
Gianluca Bertolini
Lysiane Di Nardo
Nicolo Guarraci
Interpretation: The Act of Existing Beyond the Limit
​The shot you attach represents a plant (the Snapdragon or Antirrhinum) emerging from an orange construction fence, serving as a visual representation of radical courage and essential resilience.
​1. The Tension Between Nature and Human Constraint
​The plant is not a rare orchid, but a common, robust species that tends to self-seed in difficult environments. It represents the intrinsic force and essential authenticity of life. It is the will to exist, flourish, and complete its biological cycle despite conditions.
​The net is a powerful symbol of limitation, construction, demarcation, and the bureaucracy of the human world. It is the boundary, often arbitrary and temporary, imposed by building activity or security. The bright orange color is a "stop" or "danger" signal, the opposite of the flower’s organic tone.
​Connection: The photograph does not show a conflict, but a forced integration. Nature does not fight to overcome the limit; it simply incorporates it into its growth path, demonstrating that human intervention is only a negligible obstacle to its tension toward biological excellence.
​2. Introspection and Anti-Conventionality
​The plant's gesture of growing through the net's mesh is a metaphor for anti-conventionality and stepping beyond the comfort zone, which are pillars of your life philosophy:
​Overcoming the Mesh: Every square of the net represents a social convention, an established rule, or a self-imposed limit. The plant chooses the more difficult path (through the opening), refusing to remain confined below or beside the barrier.
​Radical Integrity: The plant needs no artifice. It grows with radical integrity toward the light, its essential objective. Its "truth" (flowering) is not compromised by contact with the artificial element.
​3. Aesthetic Exigence
​From a compositional viewpoint, the work is exacting:
​Chromatic Contrast: The organic violet/pink of the flowers against the synthetic orange of the net creates an intense visual vibration. Life breaks into the danger signal, transforming the warning into an act of unpredicted beauty.
​Vector/Raster Effect: We could see the net as a cold, defined vectorial grid, from which the organic, painterly, and "rasterized" mass of vegetation emerges. This contrast exalts the difference between human abstraction and nature's chaotic complexity.
​In summary, the work is a silent manifesto: authentic and courageous life asks no permission, but uses imposed limits to define its own form, finding freedom through constraint.