Giardino Project: What Grows Between Distance and Belonging

A reflection on territory, multispecies ecologies and contemporary agriculture through the sixth chapter of giardino project and the work of Michele Guido.

Speaking about giardino project today, seven years after Volume 0, means recounting a place that is not merely familiar or geographical. The garden, part of my apartment in Trepuzzi, just a few minutes from Lecce, has gradually transformed from a private domestic space into a collective and hospitable form of contemporaneity: a critical device that generates relationships, imaginaries and practices capable of interpreting the present and continually redefining the project’s evolving grammar.

giardino project exists primarily during the summer months, as for the rest of the year I work as a lecturer in Art History in Turin. This distance allows me to observe the reality of my territory through an exploratory lens. Living and working in Southern Italy is complex, yet operating from outside the region demands commitment, perseverance and a form of devotion to one’s homeland. It is precisely within this tension, between belonging and distance, rootedness and mobility, that the impulse sustaining the project emerges. The legitimacy of living and working within a territory lies in continuity, relationships and a cultural and political independence that does not rely solely on recurring forms of state support, but on the ability to build, over time, a generative, autonomous and free organism.

This seasonality, alternating between absence and return, thus becomes an essential component of giardino project, allowing themes, intuitions and urgencies to settle and mature while generating ever-evolving modes of research, study and interpretation. By its very nature, the garden embodies a plural idea of hospitality and sensitivity that extends beyond the domestic sphere, configuring itself as a neutral and multispecies territory where forms of life, presences and visions coexist without hierarchy. From this perspective, the garden operates as a system of political connections, artistic and ecological practices, a shared landscape of coexistence and care that offers both a method and an attitude towards dialogue with the many presences that traverse and intersect it: from botany to the legacies of colonialism, from cultural ecologies to migration and conflict, through to extractive economies and the forms of responsibility that shape the field of the visible.

With Volume 6, entitled Seed · Plant · Flower · Fruit (scheduled for July 22 and 25), the garden, in the finest English tradition, opens itself to the countryside and, by extension, to the contemporary condition. This edition reflects on the artistic research of Michele Guido (Aradeo, Lecce, 1976), represented in Italy by Lia Rumma Gallery and Z2O Sara Zanin Gallery, whose work addresses the urgencies of the Salento agricultural landscape as a diffuse garden, structured as a complex cultural ecosystem in which human labour, spontaneous ecologies, vernacular architectures and layered memories coexist and continuously transform one another.

Michele Guido does not observe the countryside through a nostalgic or aestheticising lens; rather, he moves through it as a field of forces where botany, geology, territorial memory and extractive economies intertwine. Rooted in the study of living forms and the genealogies of species, his practice constructs visual and spatial devices that connect landscapes, historical stratifications and ecological processes, transforming the garden into a site for a political and morphological reading of the present. Volume 6 addresses the transformations of the contemporary agricultural landscape, revealing how the land is increasingly governed by algorithmic systems and industrial processes.

One of the opening scenes of Interstellar (2014) demonstrates how the American reality of automated agriculture replaces direct relationships with the soil through digital protocols. Shifting perspective and geography, we can observe how the global dynamics described by Cao Fei, particularly in relation to her recent solo exhibition in Milan, reveal how Chinese agricultural automation and algorithmic systems effectively strip the landscape of its human dimension, reducing it to productive infrastructure. Agriculture, transformed into a high-energy apparatus, contributes to the climate crisis, diminishes biodiversity and distances humanity from the landscape itself. Aware and conscious, though not yet entirely indifferent to this fracture, we find resonance in the multispecies perspective theorised by Donna Haraway, according to whom every landscape is the result of entangled relationships between humans, plants, animals, microorganisms and technologies: a continuous process of co-production that defines our world. Yet the computational grammar governing contemporary agriculture tends to simplify these relationships, reducing ecological complexity to a sequence of optimisable data.

The reflections emerging through Seed · Plant · Flower · Fruit intersect with Michele Guido’s research, which for years has explored the garden and landscape as genetic and temporal structures. Drawing upon the Japanese concept of MA, which unites space and time within a single experiential interval, the artist’s work functions as a cognitive matrix capable of revealing latent relationships between body, environment and representation. The pagghiare, dovecote towers, irrigation channels, tomato fields and Mediterranean scrub become perceptual structures through which to read the relationship between agricultural gesture, labour, care and territorial regeneration.

Within the hypogeum, where light, shadow and humidity generate a stratified ecosystem of plants, fungi and mosses, life emerges as a shared weave between matter and minute presences. It is within this dimension that Integratori, a site-specific work, takes shape, deepening the relationship between natural ecosystems, architecture and the garden as an instrument of biodiversity. Installed within the transept of the architectural cavity, the work assumes the form of a secular altar: pomace from the 2019 and 2020 harvests, compressed into linear volumes, becomes both sculpture and model, preserving the memory of an agricultural process thousands of years old that is now threatened by the industrial selection of species.

The temporary installation of the work becomes particularly significant because it transforms sculpture into an energetic cycle, converting residual agricultural materials into a critical matrix.

The artist’s work challenges monoculture, the reduction of biodiversity and the progressive transformation of the landscape into an agricultural monochrome, highlighting the ecological and cultural consequences of an impoverished territory. Through the compression, preservation and eventual return to the earth of pomace and stone pits, Integratori enters into the contemporary debate on post-nature, demonstrating how the living world has become inseparable from technical, economic and industrial processes. In this sense, the work enters into dialogue with artistic practices engaged in the ecological transformation of territory which, from bio-art and critical ecology to the genealogies of Land Art, share the conviction that sculpture can become an agent of regeneration, a gesture that does not represent nature, but reactivates it.

This trajectory will find its public and participatory form in Volume 6, Seed · Plant · Flower · Fruit, scheduled to take place on July 22 and 25 in Trepuzzi and Torre Pinta, near Otranto.

Credit: giardino project

All images: courtesy giardino project

For further information: giardinoproject.com