Leone Contini’s “Italian Flora” project revolves around the construction of a structure able to display several items such as drawings, photographic images, textile leftovers and dried gourds.
June 2023
This wooden structure will be part of a site specific installation at Thorvaldsens Museum, within the collective exhibition Flora Italica, curated by Karen Benedicte Busk-Jepsen, a Danish art historian, researcher and curator. The production of my project is supported by the Italian Institute in Copenhagen.
At the centre of the structure there will be a plaster cast of the Capitoline Flora herself, which belongs to the museum, and once belonged to Bertel Thorvaldsen: the structure will be a sort of shelter for the forgotten goddess, but also the occasion to display of different vegetable varieties, including the ones recently cultivated in Italy by different migrant communities. An homage to Flora, and an update for her, about the latest agricultural transformations in the Italian peninsula.
The installation will challenge the concept of autochthony, by showing contemporary Italian flora as part of the wider game of a constant journey.
