The Traveling Plant: Preparatory Logbook

Antonio Riello

The Dark Side of Green

London, UK
Worker in the Visual Branch of Anthropology (Artist)

After all the artist creative process is, for many aspects, similar to a kind of foraging: picking here and there fragments of ideas, suggestions, traditions, materials, colours, works of other artists. So, the artist is, par excellence, a sort of educated forager, by vocation and by destiny.

For many thousands years the staple of human beings was assured through foraging. Wandering, migrating, foraging: that was mainly the human way of life before the slow beginning of agriculture, likely a behaviour pattern still deeply rooted in human experience. Hunting was actually a quite rare opportunity, an occasional activity. Surviving related for ages by far on wild plants and vegetables. There was anyway a dark corner: several plants found in the wild were not edible because of their “natural” poison. The story of poisonous botany is an extremely interesting one, full of expressions like “bad reputation”, “dangerous subject”, “check & control”, “be aware!”. A narrative closely mirroring many social issues.

Re-considering artistically the “botanical culprits” might be a proper statement about the importance of the so called “wrong side” (by the way, from these plants an endless variety of medicaments have been successfully extracted).