Francesco Manacorda - Radical Nature

Visitors to London’s Barbican Art Gallery this summer and autumn encountered a dramatic, whimsical and thoroughly green alternate reality. Called Radical Nature, the impassioned and comprehensive exhibition collected 40 years of multimedia works inspired by the natural world, from luminaries like Richard Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys and Simon Starling. We had a heady chat about nature, not to mention philosophical ideas and political underpinnings, with the soft-spoken Italian curator Francesco Manacorda.

What was your vision for Radical Nature?

Essentially, the aim was to look at different modes of relating to nature, which went from a more activist approach to a collaboration in which artists or architects worked with natural elements to complete their work. We really tried to work on the relationship between inside and outside and use the gallery space as the artificial inside where nature is forced in and kept alive.

Did Radical Nature have political aims?

It didn’t have a direct political aim. My position is that the goal of art is not to be directly advocating activism per se, but very often it happens that artistic gestures have a critical political effect. But intentions don’t always go with the effect. I preferred to show a multiplicity of approaches rather than a single one.

How were each of the approaches effective?

They set a series of different tones as a way of responding to a central, shared issue. In one case, it’s an imitation that points out how nature is commoditised and displaced for corporate, political or economic use, while in another case, with Tue Greenfort’s Daimlerstrasse 38, it shows urban foxes reacting to an artificial habitat and making it theirs. Some people really like the fox work, but others find it too ironic and subtle. With different people, the artworks have different effects. Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield – A Confrontation enthralled me. I couldn’t believe something like that only took place once, in 1982.

What were the circumstances behind it?

It was done in New York in an area just north of Battery Park [several blocks from the New York Stock Exchange] that then got developed. Agnes decided to have this quite striking and dissonant project in which a piece of agricultural life was directly imported into this urban space. Along with schoolchildren, she grew and harvested [two acres of] wheat, which was distributed around the world.

I found myself perplexed by Luke Fowler’s documentary Bogman Palmjaguar, about the schizophrenic Scottish man who believed he was fused with an endangered bog. Was there a slight insinuation that such an extreme connection with nature, such as his, was normal?

I think the greatness of that work is that it doesn’t provide you with a final answer. It poses a problem that you have to solve yourself. It pushes forward equality between his mental state and the way we treat the environment, as both are relationships that go through institutions and are dehumanised, in a way. The ways we treat nature and the ways we treat mental illness could be swapped and that produces a greater understanding of the two problems.

Which installation was the hardest to set up?

Fallen Forest by Henrik Håkansson took a long time; both technically and mechanically, it was really complicated. Moving the seven metre and very heavy tree and putting it into position in the middle of the gallery was very complex.

So, what isn’t nature?

I think nothing. One of the points that I was trying to secretly make in the exhibition is that nothing is outside of nature. Interconnected organisms are dependant on each other and the system’s ability to balance itself. Nothing is outside of it – not the city, nor technological, artificial inventions.

You wrote: “there is no inside; there is no culture opposed to nature; no isolated environment removed from human civilisation, and earth is a dynamic totality constantly pushed off balance by man’s activity.”

We live in a delicately balanced system and it’s not like we would become extinct if we can’t save the rainforest in the Amazon. It’s more like our entire existence is tipping the balance of this inter-
connected system of organisms. So I think if one understands that, through our activity, we are constantly pushing the equilibrium of the system, then we are really putting our own existence in danger, not just the existence of the panda in the forest, or any other faraway image of nature.

The exhibition played upon modern feelings of displacement – why?

Displacement is certainly an element I used in the installation and in the way I selected the work. It’s a good strategy, as Agnes Denes shows. If something that shouldn’t be there makes you think of why not and what should be there, it throws up all these questions. There is a sort of compartmentalisation that creates an artificial notion of nature as being somewhere else, and not inside the city, with the city as a heavily artificial environment that has been purged of nature. That dualism is something that is wrong. There should be continuity rather than a split.

Do you see nature becoming trendy, since everyone feels like they are stuck on the Internet all the time, and fetishising going to the countryside?

Yes, and also because activism is producing a much better awareness of what the problems are, and that makes people more alert to all sorts of discussions around these themes. I hope that it becomes trendy but minus the superficial way.

What do you want viewers to take away from Radical Nature?

A different way of looking at the concepts at hand, and what we frame around the word ‘Nature’. I hope that they go away with questions about that.

And a revised definition?

Yes, but they should make their own - I wouldn't want to provide it!