Being in a wood is like being in a picture gallery. All those colours stimulate your imagination. A silent tree can tell us about the passage of time as intensely as a painting. It’s up to you to be able to read its story.
Each root, grain of the wood, branch or leaf are details that become metaphors, symbols of our ways of living. Any detail has a story to tell, just like a lance by Uccello, a stele by Pousine, a figure seen from the back by Friedrich. Each plant has a personality of its own: it is enchanting and surprising, comforting or unsettling, depending on its shape, colours and light. Each individual can identify himself/herself with a vegetable, according to his/her attitude, constitution, and ideals. However, nobody will ever be the owner of a tree, but can only desire to become one.
We take a short journey to some of the trees in the city. Each of them embodies a figure who has interpreted the imagination of these last decades. Staring at their leaves, we close our eyes, breath deeply and fill our lungs with their smell.
(Genoa, Italy 1964) Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
The artistic work of Luca Vitone (1964), which started in the second half of the 1980s, focuses on the idea of place, inviting us to recognize something we already know, defying the conventions of the faint and faded memory that characterizes the present. His work explores the way places are identified through cultural production: art, cartography, music, food, architecture, political associations and ethnic minorities. Vitone bridges the gap between the sense of loss of place, typical of the postmodern condition, and the ways in which feelings of belonging arise in the intersection of personal and collective memory. He reconstructs and invents forgotten paths reconfigured in his own personal geography.
