...queste piante ci appaiono subito come dei personaggi. L’effetto è straniante, a volte un poco surreale – fanno pensare alle Bambole di Hans Bellmer –, ma non assurdo e neppure completamente inverosimile. Eccole lì in un salotto, sospese in mezzo alla stanza, o in un angolo, o anche in spazi pubblici, a volte sole altre con delle persone che occupano quegli spazi o vi passano; a volte sembrano voler fare qualcosa, toccare degli oggetti da cui sono attratti; altre volte eccole alle spalle di persone, forse ignare della loro presenza, quasi vigilassero su di loro – come degli angeli custodi, per cui i loro rami paiono ali. sono come delle apparizioni, delle presenze indefinibili, dei fantasmi forse, che finalmente ci si rendono visibili...

 

 

Naked Plants di Gianluca Balocco (Clark Lawrence)

 

Imagine yourself a gardener and someone asking you if you would like to dig up twelve of your most interesting and healthy plants – pull them from their pots or from their flowerbeds - and show them “naked” - from the tips of their roots to the tops of their flowers or seed pods. At first I was a bit hesitant, but Gianluca Balocco convinced me it would be an interesting new way of seeing them, and sure enough, it is. We used mostly annuals that were, as it was mid-October, at the end of their life cycles; they were plants or flowers that had been sown in March and April of 2013 and had reached their maturity six to seven months later.
Most were full of seeds that I could sow the next year. Gathering seeds as soon as they are ripe and before animals or diseases get to them is a good idea, anyway, so this was my chance to examine the entire morphology of the plants carefully and collect seeds. As I washed the soil from their roots, I found their normally hidden parts as interesting as their above-ground structures. As a general rule of thumb, bushes had larger, more complicated clumps of roots while climbing vines had very little to reveal below ground level. Some plants were as large below the ground as they were above, and had they all grown in the earth instead of in pots, their roots might have been even longer. I’m unable to look at these photographs without seeing them with the eyes of a gardener. I see the beauty of the plant itself, even if it is floating naked in mid-air like no plant I have ever seen before.