Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea is delighted to announce Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature, a major exhibition dedicated to sustainability curated by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio, which opens to the public on Thursday 31 October 2024 until Sunday 23 March 2025.
The exhibition explores the creative collaboration between humans and the non-human world by gathering a selection of artists who have addressed the interdependence between humans and nature from the 1960s to today.
The show profiles different phases of artistic reflection on ecology, culminating in concerns around the current climate crisis and the theoretical developments which put into question the centrality of man in the natural system. The project focuses around the act of sharing the creative process between artists and natural elements (animal, vegetable and inorganic), interpreted by the works of artists such as Maria Thereza Alves, Michel Blazy, Bianca Bondi & Guillaume Bouisset, Caretto/Spagna, Agnes Denes, Hubert Duprat, Henrik Håkansson, Tamara Henderson, Aki Inomata, Renato Leotta, Nicholas Mangan, Yannis Maniatakos, Nour Mobarak, Precious Okoyomon, Giuseppe Penone, Tomás Saraceno, Robert Smithson, Vivian Suter and Natsuko Uchino.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by the concept of mutual support proposed by Russian philosopher and zoologist Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) in his book Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution, published at the beginning of the last century. Kropotkin claims that the survival of species does not only benefit from competition, as Charles Darwin argued; on the contrary he demonstrates that, when a system has few resources and is unstable, survival is more likely if the elements in play collaborate and share a common plan. This makes ‘mutual aid’ a key factor in evolution, particularly in times of crisis. This attitude is highlighted in the exhibition by a selection of works of art started by humans but ‘finished by nature’ or co-created thanks to the contribution of non-human elements and agents.
Mutual Aid – Art in collaboration with nature invites us to reconsider the validity of the separation between nature and culture, reinterpreting them instead as collaborating elements called upon to support and nourish each other. The exhibition proposes to the public an ecosystemic vision and an innovative and urgent approach to major environmental issues, based on coexistence, sharing and the value of multi-species collective creativity and planning.