Good morning, we welcome you to Artissima 2025! This is the audioguide project and you’re listening to track no.5, titled “No other Earth”, dedicated to works and artists that explore different ways of relating to the natural environment and resources. 1997: before playing the Bride in Quentin Tarantino's “Kill Bil”l, a film that became a cult classic even before its theatrical release, Uma Thurman played the villainous Poison Ivy in the comic book movie Batman & Robin, directed by Joel Schumacher. Pamela Isley is an ecologist working for a multinational corporation, whose research is secretly exploited in the illegal production of a toxin capable of altering and enhancing the human body. When she discovers this, the company tries to kill her by burying her in poisons and chemicals. However, she survives, transforming herself into a lethal being capable of killing with a single poisonous kiss. With magenta red hair, flashy makeup, and green outfits inspired by climbing ivy, Poison Ivy is a modern Mother Nature, determined to exterminate the human race to establish the world supremacy of plants and vegetables. Okay, the film may not be the most memorable in the Batman saga, but we liked the idea of starting this audio guide this way to reassure you: unlike the eco-terrorist Poison Ivy, the artists featured at the fair give insights, ideas, and reflections on living in harmony with nature. Exactly one year ago, coinciding with the fair, Castello di Rivoli, one of Italy's leading museums for contemporary research, inaugurated “Mutual Aid”, an exhibition curated by director Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio focusing on the collaborative relationship between art and natural elements. The exhibition drew on the theories of Russian philosopher Pëtr Kropotkin, according to whom, in an unstable scenario with limited resources, collaboration between species is the only chance of survival. Inspired by these concepts, this year Artissima is an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, to embark on a journey to discover multifaceted, inspired artists, closely connected to the environment that surrounds them. Are you ready to discover them all? These audio guides have been developed for Artissima by Arteco’s mediators. This track has been written and curated by Daniele Licata. We are ready to go! Pause the player and go to Bremond Capela, located in the New Entries section, fuchsia corridor, booth 5, to begin our visit. Press play once you have arrived. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the New Entries section, at the booth of Bremond Capela, a gallery located in Paris. We present the work of Corinna Gosmaro. There is a legend that British painter William Turner, one of the most important figures of Romanticism, had himself tied to the mast of a ship for almost 24 hours in order to study the wind-lashed sea up close and represent it as accurately as possible in his paintings. Whether this is true or not, the end result has gone down in history, with works capturing the characteristics—including the atmosphere—of nature. The paths are different, but looking at Corinna Gosmaro's work, exhibited by the Parisian gallery Bremond Capela in the New Entries section, we see formal similarities and the same interest in scientifically investigating nature. Born in Savillan, Italy, in 1987, Gosmaro trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin. Her approach is to dissect the surrounding reality, only to discover that the final result is a stratification of issues related to biology and neuroscience, ancestral cultures, and psychology. From a material point of view, Gosmaro loves working with industrial filters, which she penetrates with oil paint and spray cans. The paint passes through the mesh of the filters, telling us that a painting is never just a surface: just like in our brains, ideas and memories emerge after passing through different neural layers. Alternating dark tones with bright shades, his paintings sometimes resemble evocative horizons or gloomy explosions: in any case, they ask us – every time – what a landscape is. One of the principles that inspire the artist is linked to neuroscience and is chronesthesia, or the ability to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past, together with the ability to imagine possible future scenarios. In short, the ability to ‘travel through time’, an inner vision, which Gosmaro translates into a present and absent, figurative and abstract state of mind. For this very reason, his works are never ‘screenshots’; on the contrary, they are in constant search of transformation. In 2019, Corinna Gosmaro stated: "I constantly ask myself why I paint, because I think the answer is very mysterious. And if you decide not to paint, you also have to ask yourself why.” We have completed our first stage. Pause your player and head to SIES+HÖKE, located in the Main Section, yellow corridor, booth 3. Press play once you have arrived. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the Main Section, at the booth of SIES+HÖKE, a gallery located in Düsseldorf. We present the work of Julius Von Bismarck. Over the last ten years, the city of Turin has had the opportunity — always during Artissima — to become very familiar with the work of German artist Julius Von Bismarck: in 2023, for example, Pinacoteca Agnelli presented “Die Mimik der Tethys”, a huge buoy floating high above the spiral ramp of the former FIAT factory in the iconic Lingotto building. Born in Breisach am Rhein, Germany, Von Bismarck is presented by Düsseldorf-based gallery Sies+Höke. His works are often large-scale, with a mythological flavor; his approach, halfway between contemporary artist and scientist, investigates how humans perceive and narrate nature. In 2015, he began the Landscape Paintings series, which focuses precisely on this theme. The photographs in "Fire with Fire", for example, capture fires in German, Swedish, and Californian forests, documenting the devastating effects they cause. By mirroring the images vertically in the middle, Von Bismarck references the inkblots of psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, linked to the famous psychological test for investigating personality, and above all produces a new, seductive image that momentarily distracts our attention from man-made disasters. At Artissima, we can see two photographs from a very recent shooting the artist made in Los Angeles in November 2024. In a period when local landscapes were affected by severe wildfires, the artist took some pictures of nature after the disaster. This is one of the very few occasions in which the artist didn’t modify or transform anything: he just took a picture of the environment as it was, finding a precise, precarious balance between beauty and catastrophe. As Von Bismarck himself states, “I think the meaning of the word 'nature’ has changed a lot over the last 10, 100 or 1,000 years, and I am trying to find out what it is. Art has a great responsibility, if we think of Romanticism or landscape painting. I believe that the secret is not to show images, but rather movements, to convey how this system is in reality a continuous transformation." We have completed our second stage. Pause your player and head to Rosa Santos, located in the Present Future section, booth 10. Press play once you have arrived. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the Present Future section, at the booth of Rosa Santos, a gallery located in Valencia. We present the work of Marina González Guerreiro. A unique voice in the global intellectual sphere, French biologist, writer, and landscape architect Gilles Clément has dedicated his entire career to gardens. Inspired by the real garden at his home in the countryside, he has developed a truly structured philosophy, in which plants teach us how to migrate, to be proudly unproductive, to create political organization. The works of Marina González Guerreiro, presented by the Rosa Santos gallery in Valencia, closely resemble green areas, where small objects and subtle presences suggest vast universes. The artist, born in A Guarda, Spain, in 1992, creates large-scale installations where the relationship with the environment meets time. Materials are often ephemeral: rope, wax, water, sand, ceramics. They look like lists of symbols in which even what seems like a random detail is actually a message. The staircase, for example: an element that is an invitation to escape, but also an aid to peeking, to observing better. Or the bridge, like the one she presented in 2022 at Buen Retiro, her exhibition at Casa Encendida in Madrid. A bridge is not only a piece of architecture, but also a connection, a way of being, of placing oneself at the center of something. The inspiration comes from the Q'eswachaka rope bridge, located on the Apurímac River near Cuzco, Peru. A structure on which every year three indigenous communities gather to renovate the rope after the rainy season, giving new life to what was deteriorated. Halfway between a Peter Greenaway set and a Sofia Coppola set, Marina González Guerreiro's installations introduce a suspended time, taking the form of the memories of many people looking for a place of their own. Her works are not simply meant to be observed, but to be traversed as one walks through them, a metaphor for the changing seasons, childhood becoming adulthood, memories that are more likely imagined. González Guerreiro's works are characterized by multitudes of objects: gadgets, toys, tiles, flowers, hourglasses, threads, and wheels. Perhaps, however, more than works of art, they are amulets, capable of evoking an uncertain future and, at the same time, bringing good luck. We have completed our third stage. Pause your player and head to Lia Rumma, located in the Disegni – Drawings section, booth 1. Press play once you have arrived. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the Disegni - Drawings section, at the booth of Lia Rumma, a gallery located in Naples and Milan. We present the work of Michele Guido. When Greek goddess Hera prepared for her first encounter with Zeus, she sprinkled her hair with fragrant olive oil: it is said that the fragrance was so abundant that the sky, the sea, and the earth were intoxicated by the scent she left behind. For the ancient Greeks, the tree was immediately considered as sacred, a precious gift. At Artissima, the olive tree is presented in a different framework: that offered by Italian artist Michele Guido, presented in the Drawings section by Lia Rumma gallery, based in Naples and Milan. Born in Araldo, near Lecce, in 1976, Guido is an observer of natural phenomena. His drawings, made with the ancient frottage technique, aim to recount and denounce a contemporary phenomenon linked to the spread of a bacterium, Xylella Fastidiosa, which appeared between 2008 and 2010 in the Salento countryside, the area where the artist was born. Carried from one plant to another by the insect vector known as ‘Sputacchina’, Xylella led to the death of more than 21 million olive trees in fifteen years. This dynamic has had a huge impact on the landscape, already damaged by intensive agriculture and pesticides. Such ecological emergency inspired Michele Guido to create a series of drawings obtained by frottage of the section of charred trees. The final work is the result of assembling several sheets of paper, and the movement of the pencil on the wood is a gesture of care that also seeks to understand the reasons behind the phenomenon. At Artissima, the artist's works are exhibited close to wood from real olive tree trunks, shaping the space to give visitors the impression of being in the original field where the frottage was made. Drawings thus take on the appearance of an installation, and the stand becomes a silent protest. For Michele Guido, the son of a farmer, fields and gardens are familiar habitats, places where human rationality and nature meet. Plants and trees are real works of art and make up that ideal museum that is the landscape: only by encouraging their growth can we stem, and perhaps stop, the short circuit that is the dominance of humans over the environment. We have completed our fourth stage. Pause your player and head to Cristina Guerra, located in the Back to the Future section, white corridor, booth 6. Press play once you have arrived. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the Back to the Future section, at the booth of Cristina Guerra, a gallery located in Lisbon. We present the work of Antoni Muntadas. Born in Barcelona in 1942 and presented at Artissima by Lisbon-based gallery Cristina Guerra, Antoni Muntadas has always expressed himself through a wide range of media, from video to public art, from printing to television. In 1971 he moved to New York City, where he still lives: a seemingly secondary detail, that is actually fundamental to understand his presence in this audioguide. Just as nature is able to expand into the urban fabric, so too, for the artist, living in motion is an inevitable, political act, which, from the perspective of an outsider, allows one to observe society with a critical eye. According to Muntadas, every time a new medium takes hold, expectations are created regarding its creative potential, but in the end, these are inexorably stifled by political and industrial mechanisms. In his 2005 video work “Listening”, from the “On Translation” series, these aspects affect the relationship between humans and cell phones, objects that have revolutionized communication but also compromised our dialogue with others. We can see a semi-exterior space – some kind of inner courtyard belonging to an unspecified building, which could equally well be a shopping mall, or a museum. We see a group of people entering this open space from both ends, to talk on their cell phones, moving in a circle in a small area, thus managing to preserve some personal space from others by using this transitional non-place as an open-air phone booth. The background noise prevents their conversations from being overheard. This project is linked to one of the dichotomies most frequently explored by Muntadas: the relationship between public and private. In “Selling the Future”, a series he began in 1982 and ended in 2006, the artist composed an ideal collage of slogans from the corporate world of technology, telecommunications, and energy. The work reflects how the concept of the future is marketed by companies using similar strategies, placing a crucial concept on the same level as any other product. In this way, it makes us reflect on how capitalism shapes the ideas that inhabit our minds. We have completed our fifth and final stage: we hope you enjoyed it! If you want another perspective on the fair, go back to the InfoPoint or on the audio guides landing page, and select another podcast. Enjoy Artissima, and see you next year!