Vira and Intimate gardens
with Chiara Prodi and Zoë De Luca Legge

curated by ife collective on the occasion of Sottosopra Festival
15.09.2024
North-East Gardens of Castelfranco Veneto Castle (TV)

The garden offers itself, with its materials, to us and non-human beings to transform us all into a community of interspecies care. We delve into the depths of the relationships that can exist between life forms to explore fluid and alternative perspectives of our co-existence.

ife collective, embracing Sottosopra’s drive to propose alternatives, hybrid, flipped, and imaginative visions that can emerge from the garden as a critical space for relationships, invited artist Chiara Prodi and independent curator and writer Zoë De Luca Legge for a shared practice and dialogue, as part of the Sottosopra Festival at the northeast gardens of the Castello di Castelfranco Veneto.

Chemistry, alchemy, gathering, and transformation gave birth to VIRA, a plant dyeing workshop with Chiara Prodi. Various elements from the landscape allowed participants to dye organic fiber fabrics, discovering the different possibilities that plant elements can offer by experimenting with colors, mordants, folds, and intensities. A small base recipe for mixing color, roots, water, and fire is what remains for all participants, along with scarves infused with the essences of the landscape, with the hope of integrating it with new potions and practices for understanding the plant world.

From here, Intimate gardens explored the dynamics between humans and the garden, through an open dialogue with ife collective and Zoë De Luca Legge, starting from the magazine Hedera, which seeks to explore the convergence of transfeminist, environmental, and interspecies themes within theory and art. How can this relationship influence our perception of the world and our positioning in relation to other forms of life?

Photos by Andrea Tiatto

HEDERA vol. I
Edited by Zoë De Luca Legge
Design by Paola Bombelli
Photos by Monia Ben Hamouda