Opening of Leone Contini: Constructed Landscapes exhibition
What happens when the local hegemonic idea of an authentic Tuscan landscape clashes with the land cultivation practices of migrants from South-East China? This local phenomenon has been carefully examine by the Italian artist Leone Contini in his exhibition project Constructed Landscapes. You are invited to the opening on Tuesday 29 November at 19:00. If you would like to find out more, feel free to join us to a preview of the exhibition with the artist and curator at 17:00 on the same day.
The exhibition Constructed Landscapes addresses the collision between the local hegemonic idea of an authentic Tuscan landscape and the cultivation practices of the inhabitants of the Prato area, migrants from south-eastern China, from where emigration to Europe has been taking place for over a century. In Tuscany, crops emerge that clash with the heritage of local agrarian ideas, but nevertheless coexist in the changed climatic conditions and enrich culinary perspectives.
The exhibition at the Match Gallery functions as an informative bio-laboratory, a systemic and spatial adaptation for the display of both landscape constructs. It is an imitation, an emulation of the unromantic adaptive and practical constructions of Chinese vegetable gardening in the constructed narrative of the "authentic" Tuscan countryside.
About the artist:
Leone Contini (b. 1976) studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Siena. His research unrolls at the intersection of anthropology, aesthetics and politics, and his mediums include lecture-performances, collective interventions in public space, textual or visual narratives and drawings. He has held exhibitions and displayed his works in many renowned exhibition venues. In 2018–2019 he was a residency fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. In 2017, he was one of the selected artists of the second edition of the Italian Council call for proposals, which supports international promotion of best Italian art. In 2017, he was involved in the project TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts.