The project’s raw material consists of logs and wood waste from land management operations – materials often regarded as waste and destined for disposal. The wood, however, retains a layered organic structure that bears traces of growth, cutting and processing. Even as waste, it retains a biological memory and latent vitality, continuing to change over time.
In the context of The Matter LoopThe research is being developed in collaboration with Cooperativa Contea and takes its starting point from a practical initiative involving the management and removal of tree trunks resulting from work carried out in the local area. A material that has already undergone a life cycle and an operational cycle is thus reactivated as a subject for reflection, forming part of a process that links urban management, ecology and artistic practice.
Contea Cooperativa Sociale has been working for over twenty-five years in the field of inclusive employment, combining environmental management with a focus on social vulnerabilities. Activities such as the maintenance of green spaces, the upkeep of urban parks and work on natural areas produce organic materials that bear the traces of biological cycles and daily maintenance practices. In the transition to the artistic realm, these materials are saved from being discarded and reintroduced into a process of meaning-making. Wood, plant residues and natural elements are not simply recovered: they are reinterpreted as repositories of time and labour, as the outcomes of a relationship between community and territory. In this process, the continuity between environmental care, the social economy and cultural production becomes visible. Organic matter becomes a point of intersection between the ecological and relational dimensions, demonstrating how regeneration concerns not only materials, but also opportunities and connections.
Anna Marzuttini’s practice regards the organic not merely as an iconographic theme, but as a condition of thought and work. The focus shifts from the finished form to the processes of growth, transformation and change that the material undergoes over time. The work unfolds in a balance between impulse and control, leaving room for deviation, the unexpected and the inherent dynamics of organic materials. From this perspective, the ‘wild’ becomes a critical stance: a form of resistance to the excessive discipline of form and a way of observing how nature and human intervention influence one another.
The work is conceived as a space of negotiation between impulse and control, between natural vitality and artificial intervention. Through the use of organic materials sourced from the local area, the work creates a tension between natural memory and symbolic construction. In this process, the organic emerges as a hybrid entity in a state of transition, capable of challenging the boundary between what grows spontaneously and what is designed.
Collective exhibition
28 March – 26 April
The Circle
