Phytostopia
(2025)
eng · ita
Nature in the city is not natural. It is artificial, actually even symbolic. Its presence in an urban setting (and much of the planet has by now become urbanized), from the balcony with flowers to the large park in the city, dialectically recalls the primordial nature that disappeared from there, but also extra muros. For nature – which has no right to citizenship within the densely edified context – to be accepted, modern urban planning teaches us that it must be regulated: flower beds, tree-lined avenues, gardens, parks, squares, solitary plants or ones grouped together – the entirety of the carefully distributed urban ‘greenery’ is submitted to permanent control. This is also true for the vertical gardens and plant curtains that first appeared in large numbers toward the late twentieth century: they impose themselves in that they are the shield and ‘natural’ decoration of inert architectural material, as if the city, albeit conscious of nature’s importance, had opted for the creative use of the latter by ‘wearing’ it in the manner of a precious garment. This literally superficial phenomenon, which calls for careful interpretation, well expresses today’s ‘religion of nature’ that is proper to a post-industrial civilization like our own, which has externalized the real contact – difficult, traumatic, costly – with what, in so far as it is residual nature, has survived ‘progress’ (and thus remains exploitable). To expose, celebrate, place at the center of attention a miniaturized nature via patches of greenery, disseminated in strategic locations, identifies these actions as a mere compensatory action. Covering a whole facade with plants creates the simulacrum of an Eden, a nature-image integrated in the hyper-organized labyrinth of the metropolis. The phenomenon per se is not new: as early as in the now-distant nineteenth century, nature ‘put on a show’, as we are reminded by the example of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Indeed there, in the heart of Paris in 1867, a fake mountain was created complete with an artificial grotto, a lake, and a waterfall, all of them man-made and artfully inserted in a gigantic readymade reinforced concrete park.
On the contrary, Giacomo Leopardi already knew that authentic nature is much more than that: it is (also) violence, indifference, the source of brutal threats endangering the lives of human beings and animals. Nature’s ‘health’ itself seemed imperfect to the poet, to the extent that he even considered ‘every garden to almost be like a vast hospital’. The permanent state of ‘suffering’ in the plant world that Leopardi described, and the signs of mutability, nature’s aging, instead disappeared in the nature-image invented over the past ten years. In truth, the nature classified in scientific discourse (in this case as well the dominant idea is control and exploitation) and the nature-image in the urban sphere both represent strategies born to hide the less-known side of nature, its anarchical and uncontrollable character.
Exposed to the Covid-19 crisis in Paris, while he was a prisoner of the time interval and the city on lockdown, Pino Musi’s eye was drawn to the eruption of a surprising form of disarray. The green spaces on show in the manner of a screen before the gaze of the inhabitants and tourists, those elegant and omnipresent plant ‘fabrics’ reproduced in magazines printed on glossy paper seemed to be transformed into clumsy surfaces, chaotic excrescences. The involuntary irony of nature that has become rebellious, of an almost ‘sick’ nature synchronized with the sickness of all of humanity, allowed for an unexpected ‘return to nature’. While before the pandemic the (fake) conversation between architecture and the city, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, was celebrated in the symbolic form of a living wall (itself an oxymoron), now the manifestation of a much different nature was the source of total upheaval.
The unforeseen phenomenon of an imploded and intractable nature masterfully captured in the photographs of Pino Musi has a great deal to tell us. First of all, it is an allegory of global infection, of human life threatened by a virus of natural as well as cultural-technological origins. The danger of absolute chaos caused by a microscopic intruder had attacked those very same gigantic screens that symbolized the control over nature, those devices intended for our eyes that, in the specific phase documented by Musi, were meant to come face-to-face with a terrible clinamen. If the triumphant nature-image expressed, in the heart of the city, the safety and power of man-the-builder, then the falling apart of the formal unity of the living walls would appear to be a metaphor for a possible defeat of civilization in general. However, alongside this ‘apocalyptic’ vein (it, too, in line with the atmosphere of the days of the pandemic) we must also underscore the appearance of unexpected beauty, of aspects of nature that are still inexplicable today. The aesthetic quality at play, the entropic direction of nature that does ‘whatever it wants to’, goes well beyond a “baroque” difference. Musi’s pondering on the organic ‘carpets’ of the plant curtains in Paris, on living material having irregular margins and submitted to abnormal growth recalls the magnificent vortex in Paolo Uccello’s Saint George in London. A painting whose swirling, violent, and overwhelming form seems to express the unfathomable side of the physis of the inhabited world. The terrible experience of Covid-19 reflected in the crisis of the living walls, which no longer obey human wishes, assumes, however, – and this is where the photographic medium as Musi uses it is extremely precious – an extra-ordinary value, and is transformed into a privileged moment for reflection. Nature in disarray, which is not usually encountered in the urbanized world, acts, in other words, as an intellective source for the observer.
Lastly, in Musi’s short series there is a ‘small’ and very significant leitmotif: it is the window. In two photographs, the immense plant-covered surface appears to want to ‘engulf’ a tiny window. Art history (and not just that) teaches us that the window is the eye of a building, just as eyes might be defined the windows of the human face. Dürer captured this analogy in the detail of a portrait (made for a humanist friend) in which the reflection of the window in the eye clearly appears to be the expression of reflexivity. A first quick reading of the windows blanketed by the greenery would coincide with the idea that the latter indeed represent us, we humans exposed to death, to the possibility, that is, of vanishing. Because these windows remain visible in extremis, the same motif can also be interpreted as a symbol of human resistance: where nature becomes menacing, we still continue to ‘look ahead’.
To our mind, in any case, the critical intelligence of Musi’s works opens up to further horizons. The abundant green curtains covering the surface of buildings that are often emblematic or located in prestigious urban contexts are, first and foremost, screens, that is, devices that, instead of suggesting iconic messages, reveal living nature. Built with precision and fed by sophisticated systems (at great cost, ecologically speaking), these very special screens encompass nature in geometric cages and make it accessible in a frontal key. When the eye of the person crossing the city encounters the vegetation glued to the wall, for an instant it seems possible to see nature. They would be tempted to congratulate the designers, architects-landscapists, gardeners, and politicians who have offered this ‘gift’.
Instead, what is truly manifested by this unusual vis-à-vis that has become entropic, and suddenly immortalized by Musi’s images, is a breakdown or a deviation, because that which endures a crisis is precisely the habitual mechanism of frontality. The geometric shape – the wall – is in any case also the window of Filippo Brunelleschi, of Leon Battista Alberti, i.e., the key-image of the modern subject at the origin of Western civilization, a subject that controls, measures, organizes, builds. For as long as we continue to invent and install screens, for as long as we design our world in a rational way, we humans will stay in power and maintain our dominion over things. But as soon as that surface defined with precision (screen, wall) is scratched, deformed, nibbled at by the greenery, as soon as the visibility diminishes and risks disappearing (see the ever-smaller window), the magnificent construction and the narrative of the unlimited power of the Ego becomes illusory.
The recent pandemic was a ‘temporal window’ that was, fortunately, overcome. Seeing that human life on earth is also a ‘temporal window’, Musi’s series reveals a world on a tightrope. On the one hand, everything can be read as vanitas. Even our most obvious constructions remain fragile, ephemeral, and this is above all true when they are exposed to nature, which, obviously, is not that of the iconic-tactile Ersatz produced by the society of performance. On the other hand, the eye-window survives in spite of everything and records the utmost fragility of the current era. Anyone who identifies with Musi’s marvelous Phytostopia will no longer naively believe that the nature-image truly does, as it promises to, allow you to see Nature. This is the lesson: in times of crisis it is nature itself, uncontrolled and anarchical nature, that helps us to see reality.
Michael Jakob
