Unexpected Landscapes in Pandemic Times

At the European Pavillion in Rome Leone Contini presented  a performance lecture; the results of many years of research into the Chinese gardens that are growing in the area between Florence and Prato. Leone’s research-based practice aims to tackle the interstitial industrial space between global mobility and the rural.  During his talk, Leone reflects on Europe and the European landscape and explores questions such as: To whom does the land belong? How can we broaden the notion of landscape to include the new biodiversity brought about by migration?

Unexpected Landscapes in Pandemic Times explores transformations that took place around the artists home during the Covid-19 lockdowns, where since the early 1990s the area between Prato and Florence had evolved into one of Europe’s highest areas of Chinese migration and the landscape changed as it became interwoven with global mobility.  In the early 2000s, this liminal space was the playground (and battleground) for inter-continental agricultural experiments: the first  cultivated gardens of Chinese vegetables, created by families of migrants in the factory courtyards. These gardens soon developed into farms to fulfil the needs of the growing local Chinese community. From 2009, media campaigns were unleashed against this rural entrepreneurship, often resulting in the confiscation of the farms themselves. At the core of these xenophobic narratives concerning the Chinese farmers and their plants is perhaps the fear that a foreign, invasive seed, sprouting on Tuscan soil (to become food), might somehow threaten the community  (metaphorically and not).

The aim of Leone Contini’s practice is to question the ideological crossroads of soil, food, plants and the global mobility of humans where a foreign seed could generate unexpected landscapes, triggering a shift in the ostensibly solid ground of the countryside, which sustains the collective body: the physical one to be nourished, and the ethical one to be imagined.