Over the last few weeks, following the launch of the projects for the third edition of Thinking Like a Mountain, I had the opportunity to attend three of the four performances scheduled up until May as part of the exhibition Fossi io teco; e perderci nel verde, curated by Greta Martina, winner of the 12th edition of the Premio Bonaldi.
The experience of participating in these events was intense and led me to think about and rethink our idea of “nature.”
During Superpaesaggio, artists Attila Faravelli, Enrico Malatesta, and Nicola Ratti guided the audience through the Parco delle Rimembranze della Rocca, using sounds creatively produced with materials found on site, which resonated with the same vibration as bodies and places, immersing those present in a contemplative yet profoundly active state.
In Valentina Viviani’s performance The Missing Forest, the movements of the students of the Politecnico delle Arti along with a breath steeped in the sounds of the city guided participants from the Upper Town to the courtyard of the GAMeC, along Via della Noca, to the exhibition held in Spazio Zero.
The silence, the depth of the breath, the slow movements that suddenly froze into meaningful, highly communicative gestures provided the solid structure for a performance also designed to provide an invitation to view the city and its “greenery,” that both as absent and present, past and present.
The fact that the artists opted for urban spaces for their performances, where history and architecture mingle with nature, without “fleeing” to the outskirts of the city in search of immersed green spaces, or even simply without favoring urban parks, made me wonder about this choice, which I initially found to be a curious one. And as is often the case, when something arouses one’s curiosity, questions soon follow. Why should we think of urban culture as something distinct from green nature? Why think of nature only in the limited dimension of city parks or mountainside woodlands?
On April 10, we hosted Adriano Favole, anthropologist and author of La via selvatica (Editori Laterza, Bari-Rome, 2024), who, in conversation with Greta Martina, spoke to us about the concept of the uncultivated, which he defines as “a space with a high degree of life intensity” (Adriano Favole, La via selvatica, p. 7).
Unlike in Western societies, the concept of “nature”—traditionally conceived as the opposite of the concept of “culture” and therefore a separate domain, that of the other-than-human—is untranslatable in the languages of the oceanic cultures studied by Favole, which instead draw on the concept of the uncultivated, yet to be understood in a non-oppositional relationship with the human. For the people of New Caledonia, for example, the uncultivated is the forest where people return to after death, or, again, the forest where the Kanaks place their anthropomorphic sculptures when they decide to move on to live in another place.
The fundamental difference lies in the relationship, in conceiving of oneself as a creature connected to the non-human; in thinking of one’s life as interdependent with a multitude of non-human lives that allow us to breathe, to grow what we eat, to fertilize the land we cultivate, and so on. Philippe Descola, a renowned anthropologist who has studied the nature-culture dichotomy more than anyone else, developed the concept of “relational ecology” in the wake of his many years of field research in the Amazon among the Jivaro-Achuar Indians. There he was able to observe the relationships of the Amerindians with the non-human beings of the forest, and demonstrate how the Western opposition between nature and culture does not exist in this human group. Thinking in terms of relationships rather than oppositions is certainly more complex, for the concept of nature as opposed to culture has something reassuring about it.
After all, we do not care much for the uncultivated if not to trap it within our projects of domestication and domination, but “the uncultivated cares for us. We are the uncultivated,” writes Favole (p. 11). And again, “the uncultivated is not chaos but the womb of Mother Earth in which life takes shape and organizes itself” (p. 25).
At this point, it is quite legitimate to ask whether seeking a connection with green spaces, with the uncultivated, the non-human, means pursuing the romantic notion of escaping from the world so as to immerse oneself in nature in solitude. Does escaping into nature not end up emphasizing the distance even further between culture and nature?
Adriano Favole, Valentina Viviani, and the artists of Superpaesaggio, Attila Faravelli, Enrico Malatesta, and Nicola Ratti, seem to suggest a different path: the “wild way,” as Favole would say, urging us to acknowledge the importance of the wild side of culture (p. 118). For although human beings are symbolic creatures, “human culture has an essentially wild side to it” (p. 123).
As the choices of these artists show us, nature, or, if you will, the uncultivated, the wild, is not necessarily somewhere else, but is what pops out before our eyes, on our balconies, along the streets, in our gardens… and it is with this nature, understood as a generative force, that we must dialogue and enter into relationship, as Favole suggested during the encounter. Connecting with nature and perceiving ourselves as an integral part of it and not outside of it translates into an attempt to “connect” with the “green” sphere on both sides of our front door.
Sara Fumagalli
