Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, visits Local

 

On 28th September Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, was in Venice to hold a conference at Palazzo Franchetti in occasion of Glasstress Gotika 2015.

Within an antique Venetian Bank, bronze sculptures, glass, 500 species of ancient seeds, a gothic garden and interactive spaces wrap around the viewer in an original multisensorial site-specific installation which is a true hymn to life and to the bio- and cultural diversity.

Carlo Petrini indicates biodiversity as a value capable of becoming art, which Koen Vanmechelen – conceptual artist who in his works has always being dealing with the themes of diversity and bio- and cultural identity – has developed in the Life Bank Project.

In the setting that once hosted the Bank of Venice, in Palazzo Franchetti, today the seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, the artist Koen Vanmechelen positioned, as opening gate of an evocative gothic garden, two big black bronze hands, one male and one female, symbolic guardians of two extremely delicate sculptures made of Murano glass, representing a little chick and a heap of scattered seeds. Between the antique wooden furniture, a new bank has taken on a life of its own, substituting currency with the real patrimony of our civilization: the seed!

 

Over 500 seeds establishing the “Bank of Life” – ancient seeds that have been lost, forgotten, collected and conserved by “resilient” farmers and specialized research centers – have been selected for the project to represent the genetic heritage of our culture and our millenary history. The selection was curated by Piergiorgio Defilippi, founder of the bio-social Farm “Il Rosmarino”, Marcon (Venice).