www.vejournal.org DOI: 10.12835/ve2017.2-0093 VOL. 6 | N. 2 | 2017 LEONE CONTINI VISUAL ARTIST AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST CECILIA GUIDA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS OF BOLOGNA, ITALY WHAT WILL IT HAPPEN TO EARTH IF SEEDS GO CRAZY? A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE ‘BANK OF THE MIGRATING GERMPLASM’ ABSTRACT The conversation is mainly investigating conceptual and methodological aspects of the artwork The Bank of the Migrating Germplasm (2016) developed by the artist Leone Contini for the second edition of the program Connective Residency at Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto (curated by Cecilia Guida and Juan Sandoval). The bank is built on the relations, the stories and the moments of conviviality and dialogue with local actors, including the temporary guests of the asylum seekers centers near Biella. It’s a paradoxical device, able to record social interactions in the form of foreign seeds from displaced gardens, created by migrants for migrants, and scattered around Biella and beyond its territory, in many other Italian regions. KEYWORDS Experience, Community, Migration, Participatory Art Practice, Anthropology LEONE CONTINI studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at Siena University. In the last years he has exhibited or held intervention at: Museo delle Civiltà, Rome; GAM,Turin; Mudec, Milan; Quadriennale, Rome; Cittadellarte, 203 Biella; 2nd Tbilisi Triennial,Georgia; D-0 Ark Underground Biennial, Bosnia; Kronika, Bytom, Poland; Delfna Foundation, London; MART, Rovereto; Galleria Civica, Trento; Khoj, New Delhi; Kunstraum, Munich; Villa Romana, Florence; Viafarini and Careof, Milano; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Tirana Art Lab, Tirana; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato. He took part to the following residencies: Akademie Schloss Solitute, Stuttgart; Residenza connettiva at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy; The Politics of Food, I and II edition, at Delfna Foundation, London; Kronika, Bytom, Poland; InContext public art ecology at Khoj, New Delhi. In 2017 he collaborated with “TRACES - Transmitting contentious cultural heritages with the arts”. Leone lives and works in Tuscany, Italy. Contact the author at: [email protected] CECILIA GUIDA (1978) is Doctor in Communication and New Technologies of Art (IULM, University of Milan, 2011), specializing in relations among participatory art practices, radical pedagogy, new technologies and contemporary public space. She is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts (Bologna). She is Programme Director and Curator of UNIDEE-University of Ideas, at Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, Biella, Italy. She has curated exhibitions in museums and in public and independent spaces in Italy and abroad. In 2019 she will curate the frst solo exhibition of the artist Antoni Muntadas in Italy at MAMbo, Bologna, Italy. She is author of the Spatial Practices. Funzione pubblica e politica dell’arte nella società delle reti (Franco Angeli, 2012), and translator and editor of the Italian version of Articial Hells (lucasossella editore, 2015). She collaborates with the magazine Alfabeta2. Contact the author at: [email protected] 204 Germogli di wá wá cài e la mia ombra, sotto un frizzante sole alpino. Dunque esisto. Mr. Hu Südtirol, 2016 Leone Contini casts a jingle: he happily merged in his work the ethnographic work and the art’s languages, by exploring the potential of this generative symbiosis. His investigation of friction, intercultural confict and power relations is fnalized in a wide range of formaliza- tions: lecture-performances, interventions in public spac- es, installations, feld-sketches, ethnographic writings and audio/visual narrations. His playful visions, sometimes imbued by childish rec- ollections, are recurrent in his research: a baobab or a ‘cu- cuzza’ seed, a quotation from the Little Prince, dumplings of uncontrolled origins merging together – such as jiaozi, manti, ravioli or khinkali –, a recipe written in Wolof lan- guage, a sketch of a vegetable – incomprehensible frag- ment –, a gift from a bagger in Turin and whatever object is intercepted by his emotional sphere, and at the same time by the grid of his theoria – in its original meaning of contemplation and speculation. His apparently chaotic and compulsive collection, which seems to be guided by the categories of the unex- pected and the incongruent, establish in fact a new ‘space’, where different social fragments lay on a common ground; it’s a playful, participatory platform, where to share the everyday existence and engage in dialogues with the Other. The ‘cohabitation’ of the ethnographic approach with the aesthetic practices was the main reason why we in- vited Leone Contini at Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto for the second edition of the program Connective Resi- dency. The artwork which sprouted out of it, entitled The Bank of Migrating Germplasm (curated by Cecilia Guida and Juan Sandoval), was built on the relations and the moments of conviviality and dialogue with local actors, including the temporary guests of the asylum seekers cen- tre of Pettinengo; the association Pacefuturo; the farmers of the network Let Eat Bi; the multicultural staff of the restaurant LuogoComune at Cittadellarte, where Contini organized together with Mr. Hu several syncretic ban- quets, including lecture-performances and the creation of recipes which embodied ‘unknown’ ingredients, re- cently arrived on this territory as an outcome of the cur- rent migrations. 205 The Bank of Migrating Germplasm aims to protect the agricultural bio-diversity and to test ‘minor’ econo- mies. It is a truly collective space, an archive in-progress of migrating seeds, the ending point of an artistic practice founded on the involvement of specifc communities and, at the same time, the starting point of new exchanges with new communities – or ‘becoming communities’ – which are extending in more and more complex networks. The bank is a crossroad of stories, meetings and ‘sur- vival practices’, and investigates the future of our society, by collecting ‘germs of possibilities’ for a not yet imag- ined (social) existence. The interview here below is mainly investigating con- ceptual and methodological aspects of the research pro- cess on the feld and its aesthetical codifcation in an art- work. A special attention was given to the paradoxical in- teraction between economy, currant migrations and the agro-culinary ‘dispositif’ chosen by the artist to access a space of dialogue with the Other. Cecilia Guida: Let’s start our conversation about your artwork The Bank of the Migrat- ing Germplasm (2016) developed for Cittadell- arte’s Connective Residency with the initial idea: where did it come from? Leone Contini: There is a paradoxical economical sector growing in Italy, related with the temporary ac- commodation for asylum seekers. The complex of this activity generates an injection of EU money in often im- poverished territories. Motors of this new economy are the bodies of the migrants, housed and fed till the verdict of the commissions: the integration process starts for the few recognized as refugees, the ones receiving a negative response automatically become ‘clandestine’. In a span of time lasting for many months, the bare existence of these men determines a paradoxical situation: while their ‘un- certainty’ produces a real economy, their ‘agency’ is nulli- fed by their being kept ‘on hold’. The counter-strategies I have arranged in order to (re)build a ‘discourse’ together with the (so called) Other originate from the archetype- image of a seed, coming from a distant geography, which reactivates its own vital potential in a foreign land. The subsequent constellation of sub-narrations fowing from this original ‘seed’ marks a subversion of given power re- lations: the migrant appropriates a plot of land, he sow it (with informally imported seeds), he harvests the fruits 206 and process them through his own cooking skills and tra- ditions. It might not be by chance that agricultural activities are fourishing in some of the asylum centres, and that more settled migrants often creates a ‘garden of nostal- gia’, whose minimal form is a simple pot on the balcony with an aromatic plant from ‘the motherland’. The Bank of the Migrating Germplasm, around which I structured my project for Cittadellarte’s Connective Residency, is a collection of migrating seeds present on the national territory. The aim of this living archive is to represent/protect/implement the heritage of an asset of ‘foreign’ biodiversity that is generally perceived in nega- tive terms by the agro-culinary policies (and common sense) – in contrast with the ancient varieties, which are presumed to be ‘ours’. My impatience toward this sort of bio-essentialism entered into a generative phase after a visit to the Bank of the Germplasm in Lucca, where I came across the Gal- licano fcus bean, a pillar of the local gastronomy, illegally imported in the hat of a migrant returning from the US at the beginning of the 20th Century. What is the minimum time for a new vegetable to be ‘naturalized’ (i.e. for its full integration in the agro-culinary heritage of the communi- ty)? I started to imagine the near future and the perfume of ‘okra fower risotto’, pride of the Biellese, possibly pro- tected by a Slow Food stronghold. C.G.: The artworks on display were the results of the networking and participatory process you built during your residency on the territory with the bank of seeds of ‘hybrid’ plants representing the dispositif through which