Green Platform. Art, Ecology, Sustenability

2008

The catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Green Platform. Art, Ecology, Sustenability”, curated by Lorenzo Giusti with Valentina Gensini at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.

Contributors: James Bradburne, Franziska Nori, Lorenzo Giusti, Valentina Gensini, John Thackara, Gunter Pauli, Marjetica Potrc, Hans Drexler, Franco La Cecla.

Green Platform takes a complex critical view designed to examine at stake in an interdisciplinary fashion the issue of the environment in the dual sense of a crisis in our thermo-industrial society based on non-renewable sources of energy and of an ecological crisis caused by pollution and by the worrying overheating of our planet. The problem of ecology cannot be confined merely to an environmental approach, it needs to be analyzed and understood in its myriad philosophical, psychological, environmental, economic and social implications. Thus ecology is no longer defined solely as a natural science but as a science of interrelations, confines and cross-border osmosis, the focal link in the partnership between nature and culture.

The exhibition presents a series of works by international artists who, acting in the wake of the pioneer experience that developed in the avant-garde movements of the Sixties and Seventies, address the issues of the environment, ecology and sustainability. Different artistic approaches and attitudes are compared, ranging from an awareness of the critical state of the everyday and pragmatic relationship between man and nature, to the choice of sustainable practices that put at stake a new idea of progress, to a creative pro-activism that pursues a real ecological struggle through the artistic languages.

Not only thought as an exhibition but as a working composite platform, Green Platform is based on the attempt of offering various kinds of active experience: workshops with artists and other players in the environmental associations and NGO’s, a series of lectures with experts in various relevant disciplines and the screening of videos and documentaries on environment-related issues. The exhibition’s catalogue with entries by international authors from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures (from economy to architecture, from social sciences to public art) sets up a perfect tool for reflecting about a new idea of art and about its possible, new and “sustainable” development.