Teatrum Botanicum – Emerging Talents 2017
June 16-18, 2017
Opening: Friday, June 16th, 5 PM
PAV, Via Giordano Bruno 34, Turin

Artists: Agreements to Zinedine, Enrico Ascoli, Lia Cecchin, Gaetano Cunsolo, Cleo Fariselli, Matteo Gatti, Alessio Gianardi, Paolo Inverni, La Distrazione del Fagiano, Filippo Marzocchi, Mount Fog, Giovanni Oberti, Mauro Panichella, Gianandrea Poletta, Serena Porrati, Lavinia Raccanello, Giulio Saverio Rossi, Ruben Spini, The Cool Couple.

Talks agenda: Enrico Ascoli, Atelier A, Chan, Regine Débatty, Alessandra Franetovich, Paolo Inverni, Kabul Magazine, La Distrazione del Fagiano, Leandro Pisano.

On Friday, 16th June at 5pm PAV inaugurates Teatrum Botanicum – Emerging Talents 2017, an experimental space dedicated to emerging artists involved in the natural and ecological artistic investigation unique to the contemporary art centre.

For three days, the space will be dedicated not to a conventional exhibition, but to actual events: performative practices, projections, talks and performances-lectures, DJ and live music sets free from a precise curatorial intention, but determined to reveal a conceptual nucleus ex post. The plurality of questions arising through these interventions merge in singular, broad- spectrum question. Starting from the idea that the concept of “environment” can be difficult to articulate in a univocal definition (the generic idea of environment as “that which surrounds a given element” can be variously described by multiple fields, from biology to physics, from ecology to computer science), how can we relate to it, as artists in primis? And in doing so, what could be a personal definition of the term or a wider discourse arising from the idea of environment?
This question constitutes the starting point for a second appointment with Teatrum Botanicum, and is posed once more of last years' participating artists, along with one single instruction to observe in answering: that they describe their own practice, beginning from the specific contingency constituted by the PAV environment and the thematics of living art. In the Anthropocene era, a period in which the anthropogenic causes of global warming determine (or should determine) the priorities of government programmes all round the world, living art presents the urgency of the effort to reconsider our relationship with what the Occidental man seems to have chosen as the “other” par excellence – nature – and examines the dichotomy of thinking which prevents us seeing how nature and culture are not just connected, but formulate one another.
The question imposed on us by comparison to the organic is serious, but nevertheless the attempts to respond can be expressed in an infinity of styles, ranging from research, investigation and even the formulation of an accusation, to games, provocation, the proposal of alliances and the overturning of common sense.
Therefore, this second edition of Teatrum Botanicum aims to transform its three-day run into an occasion of reflection which yet includes a playful character, benefiting from the performative charge intrinsic in its extemporaneousness. The festival, indeed, is not composed of merely the works in exhibition, but aims to facilitate the participation of the audience inside the expositive space as much as possible during the events by which its programme develops.
In addition to the exhibition, PAV will host a series of talks by young curators, critics, philosophers, writers and artists which focus on their practice in the theoretical dimension, and with whom the public will be able to interact in the compass of the events proposed. Another fundamental element of the festival's composition is the evening programme, a musical schedule consisting of live and DJ sets, which reaffirm the aim to reach beyond a perspective which divides cultural experience into sectors and hermetically-sealed compartments. The fundamental principle of this manifold and inclusive experience is to recreate, over its iterations, a wide cross-section illustrating the general context of young Italian artists interested in the natural element and the ecological dimension. This term, “ecological dimension”, must be given greater significance, as even in talking about politics connected to urban space, relationship dynamics between man and land, or social cohesion, we can establish an important contribution to the ecological discourse.