Amy Franceschini - Nearest Nature

Artist and designer Amy Franceschini (U.S.) is interested in sustainability and the relationship between man and nature. At Bildmuseet she is presenting Nearest Nature, a workshop and an exhibition exploring the importance of language when conceiving of and categorizing the natural environment.

Amy Franceschini works with installations, social actions and publications. In 1995 she founded the on-line magazine Atlas and the organisation Futurefarmers with the vision of bringing professionals together from various fields for multidisciplinary collaborations. Alongside her artistic work Amy Franceschini lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Art, Stanford University and University of San Francisco.

The workshop and the exhibition Nearest Nature at Bildmuseet engages with the pivotal role of language when we define and denominate nature. Amy Franceschini takes as her point of departure Carl von Linné’s mapping and systematizing of species to encourage a discussion on how we categorize our natural environment. What social and cultural value systems could be traced in Linné’s flora? Carl von Linné, the founder of taxonomy, established the scientific criteria for naming and defining plants. However, his own set of values and his view upon the world was not absent when he named organisms by for example referencing mythical characters like Andromeda.

In the workshop, carried out on August 30-31, Amy Franceschini invited the general public to participate in creating alternative classifications of plants. Classifications founded in the participants’ individual and social references. Accompanied by botanist Stefan Ericsson, Umeå University, Amy Franceschini undertook a walk following in the footsteps of Linné, identified and collected plants from the Gammlia forest, drew them and gave them new names and descriptions with the ambition to create a new database of plants. The outcome of this workshop has formed the basis of the exhibition Nearest Nature, presented at Bildmuseet.

Nearest Nature is curated by Swedish freelance curator Veronica Wiman. Nearest Nature forms part of the project Urban Concerns, Bildmuseet’s ongoing collaboration with Johannesburg Art Gallery. Urban Concerns is carried out within the framework of the Swedish-South African Cultural Partnership Programme, a bilateral fund for cultural projects administered by Statens Kulturråd in Sweden and the Department of Arts and Culture in South Africa.

URBAN CONCERNS
Amy Franceschini - Nearest Nature
Kurator: Veronica Wiman