Spora

Spora is configured as the first intervention within the format imagined by CANI residency. The exhibition relates to a peculiar rural environment, an olive grove affected by Xylella, located between San Foca and Melendugno, which becomes the base camp for a series of artist residencies. Šimon Chovan makes a series of sculptures for Spora, using materials partly taken from the olive field and largely made up of plant elements. The soil and all the tools used by the artist collaborate symbiotically with the surrounding landscape, to the point of amplifying its organic characteristics. The exhibition reflects on the increasing contamination and contact with new pathogenic forms, the constant acceleration of trade and human movements on the globe which foster the birth of new epidemics, both in human beings and in plants. Chovan focuses, without any moral or scientific judgment, on the processes that underlie the metamorphosis of living organisms with special attention to the nomenclatures, often binary, that still accompany this type of study. Can one still talk about blame? Would it not make more sense to turn the idea of contamination upside down and imagine spores and bacteria as tourists invading a new landscape? How does an all too well known intimate summer story of love and affection situate within the grand narrative of ecocides and pandemics? 40°17’43.3"N 18°21'54.4"E