The garden was so beautiful that she was afraid of hell

The title of the exhibition, The Garden Was So Beautiful That She Was Afraid Hell Might Throw Us Off Our Path. It is taken from a short story by Clarice Lispector, a rebellious writer of interior monologues. Sitting in a lush botanical garden, still shaken by her unfortunate encounter with a blind man on a bus, Ana, the protagonist of Love discovers that he “belongs to the strong part of the world,” he perceives the oppression of the limits of morality and bourgeois existence, which tends to simplify, reduce, control.

The nature portrayed in Vincenzo Castella's photographs and footage is precisely nature collected, grown in captivity, domesticated.

Modern sensibility, from the scientific thought of the 17th century through European Romanticism, works by separation and dualism: on the one hand, the subject, the human being who observes; on the other, nature, the object of observation.

Modern botanical collections are inseparable from the trade routes between Europe and the eastern or American colonies. They represent the entire perverse network between colonialism and scientific knowledge. The modern museum is also based precisely on the relationship between nature and art and history, neutralized in the name of natural sciences.

But science is not a neutral discipline: the process of objectification is active both in the construction of the idea of ​​nature (nature-object) and in the creation of the idea of ​​race (human-object), of patriarchy (woman-object) and of the binary definition of gender identity.

In these photographs, the subject-object relationship is questioned by an excessive close-up that nevertheless allows for an overall view. The camera is positioned in the middle of the plants. The lens creates a circular halo around the centre of focus, the 22º Halo, an optical phenomenon that appears around the Sun or the Moon and sometimes around other strong light sources.

“Botanical inventories, fragments of nature: what value does representation have in the history of art? Does it still work?”

Castella's photographs tend to annul the subject-object relationship, they unite pieces of reality, create an imaginary, sustain the imagination.

They constantly resort to the typical ambiguity of poetic language, which allows the model of complexity to be duplicated.

They are born in a specific time and situation: they refer to the present, not eternity.

Salvatore Lacagnina