Raffaella Spagna & Andrea Caretto

Landscape artist Raffaella Spagna (1967) has been working since 2003 with Andrea Caretto (1970), a museologist with a degree in natural sciences. Their projects are most often linked to ecological concerns and particularly to the interaction between organisms and their environment. They are also interested in the contact points between nature and culture. Each of their exhibitions constitutes a new stage in a continuing process of renewed experience, and gives a glimpse – always partial – of scientific work that, taking an intuitive approach to art, examines phenomena that do not necessarily find a place in the conventional natural sciences.

From the concept of the original plant defined by Goethe to the morphic fields of Rupert Sheldrake, from the circulation in water of nutrients essential to animals and plants to the growth of geological formations or microscopic crystals, the fundamental interest of these two artists focuses on the creative forces of nature, on morphogenesis not only of matter but also of living beings. And all while alluding, often metaphorically, to forms that determine art and culture. Taking quite specific plants, such as ancient cereals, or wild plants with certain exploitable characteristics, and arranging them in an original and vivid manner in the museum space, Raffaella Spagna and Andrea Caretto refer to the point of intersection of these two worlds of nature and culture that are too radically separated from each other in the Cartesian tradition.