With the project “Connected Ecosystems. Museum and Post-varietal Communities”, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, curated by Maria Rosa Sossai, the duo Aterraterra (Fabio Aranzulla and Luca Cinquemani) invites us to rethink our relationship with food and cultivated plants. They challenge the established structures and regulatory assumptions of the agri-food industry through practices of uncontrolled and unpredictable hybridization that destabilize notions of “purity” and “authenticity”, making explicit the anthropic role in the construction of cultivated species in an era dominated by an imperative to defend “naturalness” and tradition. In the contemporary necrocapitalist society, food operates as an ideological device, contributing to the consolidation and normalization of forms of exclusion and exploitation, both environmental and human. In Italy, the rhetoric of Made in Italy, alongside the multiplication of certifications (e.g., DOC, DOCG, IGP), has turned into a kind of national mythology; a narrative built more on collective imagination than on actual production conditions. Words such as “excellence”, “tradition”, and “genuineness” fuel a perceptual system founded on a retrospective genealogy that looks to the Roman Empire and the Renaissance to mask the country’s structural crisis. If the future slips away, the past must be hyperproduced. This is not merely a set of commercial mechanisms, but spaces of symbolic and material accumulation where genetic, aesthetic, and narrative control practices intertwine. Culinary tradition thus transforms into a surrogate for industrial policy, a tool of consent that conceals labor precariousness and numbs social conflict. Working with foods deeply rooted in the Italian imagination and identity, Aterraterra intervenes to break dominant narratives, opening a space for critical and collective reflection on the cultural, economic, and symbolic foundations sustaining the contemporary agri-food system. Their work takes the form of a radical critique of the agroindustry’s standardization and homogenization logics, but also as a poetic gesture that goes beyond intellectual speculation or ephemeral action to experiment with forms of (non)intervention over the long term. These aim to generate other ways of relating to nature and food, redefining concepts like edibility, cultivation, and time, and giving rise to devices capable of challenging cultural hierarchies and economic structures.
Starting from the Connected Ecosystems project, in this conversation, Fabio and Luca guide us into the heart of their work, narrating not only the project itself but also the visions, concepts, and possibilities that drive their artistic practice to challenge deeply rooted beliefs about agriculture, food, nature, and identity.
Fabiola FIocco: You often refer to “post-varietal communities” and “post-agricultural perspectives” as central ideas in your practice. Could you unpack what these terms mean to you, and how they come to life both in your overall artistic approach and more specifically in the project “San Marzano 2”?
Aterraterra: Post-varietal communities are not just a concept but also a practice we have arrived at through a series of critical reflections on the ideas of “naturalness” and varietal purity in cultivated plants. These ideas reinforce a view of the food crop varieties we eat every day as fixed and natural entities, concealing the fact that agricultural plants are the result of a process of domestication, selection, and genetic disciplining guided by humans. In concrete terms, with post-varietal communities, rather than maintaining separate single varieties, we grow many different varieties of a species—for example, tomatoes— all together so that they hybridize randomly, without human control. The crossings that result from this process give rise, in the second generation, to plants with unpredictable traits and forms, always different and no longer traceable to the original agricultural varieties. Post-varietal communities are, therefore, a critical concept, and an “anti-agricultural” artistic experiment in genetic destabilization and deconstruction of the long process of disciplining that led to the creation of the original varieties. The breaking of this presumed purity challenges the idea of “varietal fixity” and shows how, when human control is removed, the plant forms we believed to be natural and immutable change. This shows that these forms are not at all a natural given, but rather the outcome of a set of practices of genetic and morphological control over plants.
It is important to contextualize the background from which the concept of post-varietal community arose in our work. We work extensively with seeds, and when we first began engaging with them, we often heard phrases like: “we must protect seed biodiversity”; “we must save these ancient varieties”; expressions that reveal romantic ideas about nature and the past. We wanted to show how all these expressions are, in fact, myths. Many of the seeds we consider ancient are not truly so, and often these expressions imply a broader idea of what is natural and what is not, even at the genetic level. This issue gives us a bit of a chill, because it easily connects with discourses that often circulate when it comes to humans, for instance, when defining a person's gender. These are very powerful and problematic narratives, which many people no longer question, accepting them as absolute truths. These observations led to the first post-varietal community in 2022. We did not yet call it that at the time, although it already was one in practice. It was an installation at ZACentrale of the Fondazione Merz, as part of the exhibition “Ordo naturalis Ordo artificialis”, curated by Agata Polizzi and Beatrice Merz. The installation, entitled Somebody told us a story about nature and purity, consisted of an indoor cultivation consisting of a two-meter by two-meter tank, in which several varieties of wheat were growing under artificial lights installed to allow for photosynthesis. We had mixed around eight so-called “ancient” varieties of wheat, sowing them entirely at random and allowing them to grow and hybridize freely.
These grains are described, especially in commercial communications, as “ancient varieties”. In reality, if we look more closely, many so-called ancient grains are not ancient at all but were selected and developed by geneticists during the fascist period in Italy, with the explicit aim of ensuring national self-sufficiency in wheat production. Today, we continue to carry this legacy with us, forgetting its historical origins and presenting it as something “pure” and “natural”. With that project, we wanted to break this narrative, challenge it, or at least highlight it, by creating a mixture in which it was no longer possible to distinguish which form belonged to which variety. The use of artificial lighting in that first post-varietal community surprised many people who, thinking of wheat, expected something romantic, poetic, “natural”, and instead found themselves faced with a cold, laboratory-like setting dominated by artificial lighting. We intentionally worked on this meta-level in formal terms to show the extreme degree of construction of “naturalness” and the imagery created around it. In some ways, this was the first device through which we developed the idea of post-varietal communities on both a conceptual and practical level. Since then, we have continued the experimentation by initiating post-varietal communities at MUSE, the Science Museum of Trento (2023), and at the Design Museum in London (in collaboration with Eliza Collin) (2024 – ongoing).
This brings us to the project we are currently working on: Connected Ecosystems. Museum and Post-Varietal Communities. In this case, we have deepened our research on tomatoes by planting twenty-five different varieties together in an area adjacent to the museum’s walls. Some are domesticated varieties, while others are wild species—the ancestors of the tomatoes we use today. We collaborated with the architect Elena Catalano to create structures that enhance the possibility of cross-pollination and allow the plants to climb together. This creates an environment of maximum proximity between flowers of different varieties, encouraging cross-varietal hybridization by pollinating insects. Tomato flower pollination, in fact, occurs primarily thanks to the actions of these insects, which carry the pollen and facilitate the crossings. The area where the tomatoes grow is also shaded during the early morning and late afternoon, which attracts many of these insects as well as small animals. These life forms will play a crucial role in the genetic mixing that will characterize the post-varietal community and how it will evolve year after year and adapt to that location. The aim is to maximize the possibility of uncontrolled cross-pollination, and, thus, destabilize, deconstruct, and undo the original varieties. In this case, there is also an additional element because we have introduced wild species that predate human domestication and which still exist in South America. They produce small, edible currant-like fruits. Introducing these genetics, so distant from the domesticated gene pool, means that by the second generation, we will already see traits emerging that differ significantly from those of the original varieties. Furthermore, these wild species have resistance characteristics, as in the case of Solanum pimpinellifolium, showing, for example, a greater ability to survive in conditions of drought and high temperatures. This may lead to the diffusion of such traits within the post-varietal community, precisely thanks to hybridization and the interspecies relationships that will take shape between the tomatoes and the other life forms present. Here, we would like to add that when we talk about a lack of human control in post-varietal communities, this is not entirely true. We are obviously part of this choice. We are the ones who decide which varieties to include and who create the conditions for this hybridization. Through art, we experiment with attempts to remove human control, which are destined to fail in an absolute sense, but which are, at the same time, very effective in showing how pervasive, invisible, and under-analysed this control is in the interspecies relationship between humans and cultivated plants.
Concerning the theme of post-varietal communities, one last thing to highlight is how this idea shifts the focus from individual varieties to a community of plants. It therefore presupposes the idea that we no longer cultivate, for example, the San Marzano variety, but a community of tomatoes with ever-changing and unpredictable shapes that will adapt and transform themselves to a specific location. Obviously, this vision stands in contrast not only to the monocultures of industrial agriculture but also to many small-scale farms, where one often still finds a strict division by variety or species. If we look closely, even those who cultivate a small community garden can reproduce, on a smaller scale, the same patterns of control and separation that we find in industrial agriculture. We do not mean to say that this is wrong, nor do we propose a definitive solution. Rather, we intend to stimulate reflection and to show how certain cultivation patterns are repeated and recur even where we might least expect them. Finally, if we shift our attention to the consumption side, post-varietal communities break with and disregard our expectations regarding the varieties of vegetables we are used to eating, making these new plants completely incompatible with the logic of the market, where standardization is essential. This means that imagining post-varietal cultivation not only radically challenges the practice of growing by individual variety, but also makes the harvest unpredictable in terms of shape, taste, and more, thus forcing us to rethink the way we cook and eat.
As for the post-agricultural question, it represents for us a theoretical and methodological focal point that we have been developing for a long time, and it lies at the foundation of our artistic practice. Post-varietal communities are one part of this. Post-agriculture, in our understanding, is a way of rethinking the relationship between humans and cultivated plants through a process of deep and multi-level analysis.
Fig. 1
FF: With the title San Marzano 2, you refer to the history of a tomato variety artificially created after the original San Marzano type was removed from the National Register of Vegetable Varieties following a virus outbreak in 1991. With this choice, your work challenges the very idea of “naturalness”, revealing how what we define as “natural” is, in fact, a social and ideological construct, often instrumentalized to support reactionary worldviews or to justify forms of oppression and exploitation. Furthermore, the tomato holds an almost sacred place in Italian culinary culture. It features prominently in traditional dishes and is reproduced on souvenirs intended both for tourists and locals, becoming a symbol of collective identity—an embodiment of what Simone Cinotto has termed “gastrofascism”. Before seeing your billboard, I had a very specific image of the tomato in mind, but what I found was something disorienting, raw, and unexpectedly intimate. In what ways does this work challenge the preconceived idea of nature, exposing the ideological superstructures behind our desire for purity, authenticity, and tradition?
A: I [Fabio Aranzulla, ed.] grew up in Germany, but my parents are Sicilian. So, I was raised within an identity crisis that wasn’t so much mine as my parents’. A kind of hyper-identification with “being Italian”, which was passed on to me very strongly. Then, during adolescence, all this collapsed because I realized that it was a very problematic construct. Both in Italy and abroad, the image of the perfect red tomato, so full of juice that it looks ready to burst, is a very powerful symbol of Italian culture, a source of pride for many people. Yet, as we know, the tomato is not originally from Italy. Its arrival in Europe is linked to colonial dynamics, and its use is relatively recent, carrying with it a history of colonization, racism, and oppression. We want to problematize the feelings people have towards this perfect image, inviting them to reflect on how these emotional ties are based on narratives that omit or simplify an important part of history. First of all, the tomato that we think of as natural or spontaneous does not exist but is the result of processes of domestication, hybridization, and selection, and, therefore, of practices of genetic discipline and human design of the vegetable. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, there are major issues associated with its large-scale cultivation in Italy, which requires vast expanses of land, raising serious concerns about the exploitation of human labor, other forms of life, and the territories themselves. We cannot help but think here about the concept of the plantation, a model based on the violent simplification of ecosystems, and the control and disciplining not only of plants, but also of human bodies and other life forms. A model from which colonial and exploitative logics still survive today in different forms. In the narrative construction of the “myth” of the Italian tomato, a kind of editing takes place, cutting away all the problematic parts, both those concerning the interspecies relationship between tomatoes and humans and those involving social relations between humans past and present. What remains, in the end, is only the image of the Italian tomato presented as something natural, even a source of national pride, erasing all complexity and conflict.
But let's move on to San Marzano 2: when we think of San Marzano—but this applies to tomatoes in general—we immediately think of the advertising image with the bright, glossy red fruit, perhaps with a few drops of dew to make it look even fresher and more appealing. On nearly every bottle of sauce, we also find the Italian flag, suggesting not only that the product was grown in Italy, but also evoking a sense of pride and national belonging. This happens not just in advertising, but across many domains where a similar representation appears. We then asked ourselves how we could invite people to reflect on and deconstruct this narrative, and we started experimenting with the image of the tomato, trying to create moments of extreme closeness and intimacy in which to see what is normally concealed in this symbol of national mythology, such as its juicy texture, the different internal consistencies, and seeds. In some way, we wanted to show its most unpleasant and unexpected parts, those that often provoke a sense of repulsion or disgust in many people. We wanted to create a kind of tension that is often difficult to put into words: what is this thing we are looking at?
To this image, we added the inscription San Marzano 2. We are all familiar with San Marzano, a variety that is well known both in Italy and abroad. However, we wanted to add the number 2 to prompt people to learn more about its history and the human labor of selection and genetic disciplining that lies behind the creation of this commercial variety, which has replaced the so-called “original” one. On this idea of an “original”, it was important for us to emphasize that both the historical San Marzano variety and the current replacement varieties, such as San Marzano 2, are equally the result of a process of domestication, selection, and discipline. The work debunks both the romantic idea of the cultivated variety as a fixed entity and the notion of “original” varieties as somehow less artificial or purer, as there is no “origin” to recover, no purity to protect, but a continuous series of transformations, narratives, and artificial selections guided by humans.
FF: And what does it mean to initiate a process of varietal deconstruction starting from a food so laden with political and cultural connotations? What kind of reactions have you received from the public so far?
A: Let’s start with an example that doesn’t directly concern tomatoes but which speaks about national identity and its relationship with plants, particularly those considered “invasive” or “native.” We were invited to Biel, Switzerland, to perform a food performance, a format we often use because we find it very accessible. For us, it’s important not to speak only to a small circle of people, and food, the act of eating, connects us all. There is no need, for instance, for academic training, as it is something very much tied to experience. Precisely for this reason, our food performances are a very open and inclusive format. During the performance in Switzerland, we only fed the audience plants considered “invasive”. This was because, when we arrived in Biel, we noticed that they had installed large containers in one of the city's main squares, planting “invasive” species inside, accompanied by signs telling people: “these are the plants to be eliminated!”; “if you see them, uproot them!”. This operation reminded us of the persecution of witches and, more generally, of certain other groups of humans or animals. It was a use of language aimed at pointing out a collective enemy to be eliminated, displaying it unequivocally and emphatically through the creation of a visual device.
Growing up in a place where the concepts of “invasive” or “exotic” are so deeply ingrained, it’s very difficult to detach oneself from these definitions. It was important for us to try to question these concepts together with the people of Biel. So we decided to invite them to eat these plants while we shared the stories and narratives connected to them. It was a wonderful experience because suddenly the plant that someone had learned to hate entered into a previously unthinkable relationship: through ingestion, a gustatory relationship was born—sometimes pleasant, sometimes very unpleasant. But it is precisely there, through taste and the body, that a kind of rupture occurs, a crack in the pattern, something that initiates an unexpected relationship with the plant. During the food performance, a sort of common metabolic act was generated, in which we ate together while listening to and reconsidering taken-for-granted narratives and definitions. This has a very direct effect on people because the plant is no longer just a symbol or a story. These projects, like those on tomatoes, do not aim to provide answers but rather to open a space for conversation and reflection, to try to observe and deconstruct narratives that are often assumed to be neutral and natural.
As far as tomatoes are concerned, the process of varietal deconstruction that we propose is often received as an interesting experiment, but we suspect that not everyone fully grasps its significance. For instance, we have the impression that, at least in Sicily, there are many prejudices and mistaken expectations about artists working on themes similar to ours, and that this creates a barrier preventing people from grasping the radical nature of our perspective. We notice this, for example, in some media coverage that reduces the complexity of our project to “art and sustainability” or uses problematic, pre-packaged phrases like “green transition”. We believe there is still a great deal of work to be done. The naïve idea of an artist working with plants searching for something like “a lost naturalness”, or dedicating their research to diluted and exhausted concepts like “sustainability,” is the furthest thing from our approach. For us, the concept of “nature” is the ultimate artifice, the most dangerous narrative of all when referring to plants, and cultivated plants in particular. The concept of nature is the perfect mask for hiding interspecies power relations, identity constructions, and forms of oppression and exploitation of bodies, which is precisely what happens with tomatoes. We try to show the deep structures beneath this surface. Not everyone is ready to accept this disturbing complexity.
FF: You often work around the notion of edibility. In this project, how is “edibility” reimagined or expanded? How do you conceive of the space between cultivation and consumption? Who is invited to sit around the table? Which bodies enter this space and which leave?
A: We reflect a lot on the theme of edibility, because here, too, we are operating within the realm of narratives. The definition of what is “edible,” “toxic”, or “inedible” is always historically and culturally determined. It is a very subtle boundary, constantly shifting, and for us it is important to work on this boundary, on the narratives that uphold it. For instance, the question of the edibility of wild plants is not, for us, tied to a romantic idea of recovering the use of wild herbs from the past. Rather, it is an opportunity to shift the boundary of edibility, expanding the concept to include more and more potentially edible plant foods that do not come from agricultural cultivation. The possibility of experimenting with the cultural limit of what is edible concerns not only areas far from cities but also fully involves urban areas as well as cultural institutions, including museums, which often have an interesting edible aspect that goes unconsidered.
In this regard, we think of The Edible Institute, a project we have been developing for two years at the Swiss Institute in Rome. In this case, the entire Institute is considered as a complex organism with its own metabolic structure, where human and non-human trophisms intertwine. Within this context, we introduced “edible zones,” areas with cultivated edible plants that extend the edibility already present in the Institute's garden, not only linked to wild plants, but also to those traditionally considered purely ornamental, but which are often edible as well. On multiple occasions, we have created discursive moments, public occasions for discussion through food and collective eating, where the entire Institute became, in some sense, edible. The project stems in part from the idea of wanting to “eat cultural institutions”, both metaphorically and materially. What would happen if we could eat the walls and paintings of the Institute? Whether they are digestible or harmful is another matter. Fundamentally, we are interested in looking at physical matter and its chemical composition, even in a radical way, and asking ourselves the question: What does it mean to be edible? We ourselves are edible, with continuous processes inside us digesting ourselves through bacteria and other forms of life.
So, edibility does not just mean going to a restaurant and eating a plate of pasta. It is a much more fluid, complex, and collective process, and this ties in very well with the question of who is invited to the table. This question alone reveals a great deal: we ask ourselves who we invite to the table, but in reality—whether we like it or not—there are already many forms of life present at, above, inside, and around that table. The real question then is: who do we look at? Who do we accept as such? To whom do we narrate? We try to maintain control, but this completely escapes us, and so we cling to the narrative of presumed control. I might think I am my body and my brain, but in reality, I am many forms of life. Without bacteria, for example, I would be dead. The very fact that we ask who we invite and who we exclude is a profoundly human thought because it presupposes an otherness and discreteness of life forms that, in fact, do not exist. We think that an interesting approach might be to accept the fact that we are central to our perception, and that verbal language is aligned in this sense, but that, despite this, we must strive to experiment, to find new ways of looking at so-called “other forms of life” not as other forms but as lives that pass through us, that coexist, that transform and that are related—mainly through food—not only to us, but also to each other. This reasoning also gave rise to the idea we have been working on lately, that of “common appetite”, the idea of questioning the centrality of human appetite, of the human mouth as the reference point for the entire food system, when in reality there are several appetites, an enormity of forms of life already present that we do not take into account. For example, plants have something like mouths on their lower surfaces called stomata (from the Greek “stoma”, meaning mouth) through which they exchange substances and absorb carbon, for instance. Bacteria also phagocytize and eat. There is a whole “common appetite” that we do not take into account, centering human hunger and trophic needs, and this reflects across all relationships, translating into definitions of what is useful, what is edible, what is important for humans, and what is not. In this sense, an entire metabolic and biological dimension is totally eclipsed, remaining invisible or only partially narrated because it is not pertinent to the centrality of the human appetite. This also applies to currently popular topics such as fermentation or the gut microbiota, where bacteria or yeasts are described as generic transforming agents serving humans by producing food products beneficial to our health. Here, too, a similar pattern to plant cultivation is repeated, consisting of control, extractive relationships, and it is oriented towards the production of food and profit for humans. We would like to imagine other forms of food, of art, of the collective—in which we can not only retell but also experiment with new relationships, overturning the centrality of human appetite. However, as mentioned above, the limitations of verbal language remain.
The Manifesto for a Multispecies Collective (2020) is exemplary in this regard. It is a project born out of our attempt to create a collective that would include non-human life forms and that would not focus on human decision-making, power, or control. Of course, it quickly became clear just how difficult it is to apply a concept like “multispecies collective”, or the very idea of shared decision-making with other forms of life: ideas that exist only in human verbal language. And yet, a few years on, we can say that, paradoxically, it was precisely this failure that proved to be the most significant and generative aspect of the project. From that experience, which could not be realized in practice but could be conceptualized through language, we drew many ideas that have since led to further research.
Fig. 2
FF: In the billboard, you have consciously chosen to remove any human trace, even though human labour remains conceptually central to the work. At the same time, the tomato pulp itself becomes strangely corporeal, almost flesh-like. Could you speak about this decision to visually exclude the human element? And how might you imagine reintroducing or reimagining it in future iterations of the project?
AA: Why is there no human presence? The tomato already tells the whole story: its genetic manipulation, its exploitation, and the human narratives it carries. We deliberately chose not to include, for example, a hand picking the tomato, because we didn’t want to fall into the trap of voyeurism, or feed it, nor did we want to reproduce an act of revictimization of racialized and marginalized bodies in tomato cultivation, especially considering the position of the speaker and the viewer. We need not feed into that kind of practice, which only leads to further exploitation or reinforces existing narratives and assumptions. To challenge the notion of the “perfect tomato”, of the “Italian tomato”, already makes the human presence felt, along with all the contradictions and violence that come with it. We spoke with several people from South America, and it’s important to acknowledge that what may be a difficult heritage for us is, for them, a direct and ongoing violence. The tomato is something beautiful, tied to home, and yet at the same time, painful. We believe these themes must be addressed without instrumentalizing exploited bodies. It’s a challenge, but it’s the only direction we’re willing to take. Our focus is on the genetic work done on the tomato, and on the many layers of historical, cultural, and economic meaning it holds. The project will certainly continue. There will be another exhibition where we will continue to develop these themes, but we don’t plan to include human bodies.
Furthermore, our work is very relational and does not end with the moment a work enters public space or is exhibited, but often develops through workshops, discussions, and collective reflection. An interesting example is Frankfurt. We held a workshop as part of the exhibition There is no there there at the MMK MUSEUM FÜR MODERNE KUNST in Frankfurt, an exhibition that addressed the role of migrant workers, known in German as Gastarbeiter*innen—literally “guest workers”—a term rooted in the idea that they were expected to stay just one year and then return to their countries of origin. In that context, we proposed a workshop dedicated to narratives related to words such as “exotic” and “invasive”, which we carried out with a small group of about ten people. Several participants shared personal experiences, discussing what it means for them to feel perceived as exotic and how this label impacts their identity and daily life. Among them was a white man, approximately sixty years old, heterosexual, and middle-class. When asked what came to mind with the word “exotic”, he initially responded with very positive adjectives: something beautiful, very good, very rich. But as we began to question that term and its meaning, we saw his face stiffen, and he grew silent. We tried to gently draw him back into the discussion, and little by little, he opened up, though with some caution. We later learned that a few days after the workshop, he called the museum to thank them. He said the session had pushed him to reflect critically on himself in a way he never had before. These moments are important to us because they create a space where we can share experiences and ideas and develop them together. But we also feel a responsibility to engage people who may feel distant from these conversations, and to invite them to reflect on their position.
FF: How does operating in Sicily, a region already struggling with climate change, influence your approach and push you to imagine strategies that go beyond emergency responses towards long-term ecological visions?
AA: Going back to the first question, the post-varietal community is not only about opening up and building new layers of narrative around ideas of purity or naturalness, but also about creating a community capable of slowly adapting to the specific conditions of a place. This perspective is closely tied to the climate crisis. Sicily, and, therefore, Castelbuono, where the project is underway, have been severely affected in recent years by extreme droughts, desertification, and long periods without rain that are punctuated by highly localized and violent storms. These conditions are accelerating transformations within ecosystems. Added to this is the recurring problem of major wildfires that devastate the territory every year, putting the least anthropized areas at particular risk.
We are facing increasingly extreme weather events, prolonged heatwaves, or highly localized phenomena, such as destructive flash floods in confined areas. This compels us to think in terms of micro-ecosystems. If we continue to apply models of cultivation and food production designed for stable ecosystems, we risk hitting a wall, which, in fact, is exactly what we are doing. The post-varietal community, in a post-agricultural sense, seeks to open itself to the idea of a community in which certain traits or certain plants will prove more resilient, more capable of adapting to hyper-specific conditions, of forming relationships with the life forms present, and of persisting in some way. I’m not sure we should talk about adapting to climate change, which by now has become a condition we must learn to live with.
Here I refer back to two points that emerged during this conversation. The first concerns the reason why the so-called “original” San Marzano tomato disappeared: a virus. This is closely connected to epidemics and the inherent fragility of varieties selected through industrial agriculture. Monoculture, in fact, creates vast expanses of a single, genetically uniform variety: an enormous banquet for viruses, insects, fungi, and other life forms, all of which can feed on a large number of tomato plants with similar characteristics. Under such conditions, these organisms can proliferate uncontrollably, leading to the decimation of entire crops; something that does not happen, for example, in an uncultivated environment where greater biodiversity tends to maintain a balance between predators and prey. Industrial agriculture has always responded to epidemics with warfare: the heavy use of pesticides, and militarized narratives against “pathogens” and “diseases” to be “eradicated”, or “weeds to be destroyed”. This is where the concept of common appetite, which we discussed earlier, becomes relevant. In the cultivated field, where all forms of life considered foreign must be demonized and eliminated—except for the monoculture that will produce food for humans—it is precisely these excluded and marginalized mouths (bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, etc.) that may at some point reappear with extreme vitality and virulence, “eating” and devastating the human monoculture. A second point concerns the idea of linearity in relation to climate change. We often imagine that rising temperatures simply mean it will get increasingly hotter, but this rise can also manifest through storms or extreme cold. In South America, for example, we are currently witnessing exceptional cold waves, a consequence of the disruption of climatic patterns, which can also result in sudden and deadly drops in temperature. Extreme cold is an indirect manifestation of global warming, producing effects that may seem contrary to the overall trend but which are actually part of the same climate destabilisation, bringing with it increasingly unpredictable atmospheric phenomena.
Sicily, for example, is not particularly vast. It takes about three and a half hours to drive from Palermo to Syracuse, yet the microclimates across the island are remarkably diverse. In the area around Syracuse, for instance, the European record for the highest temperature was recorded in August 2021 (48.8°C). In such a context, a post-varietal community could gradually develop specific adaptive traits, guided by human intervention, such as by collecting seeds from the fruits that proved most resilient. This would help promote characteristics like drought-resistance. The approach we want to take, and on which we are conducting our research, does not consist of applying preconceived cultivation models from the outside onto ecosystems that cannot sustain them. Rather, it is about proceeding in tune with the life forms already present. Nor is it a question of offering better techniques for cultivation, but of interrupting dominant, hegemonic, and anthropocentric narratives and practices, of pausing, even briefly, to collectively reflect on our position and the direction we are heading.
Fig. 3
FF: The billboard is part of Ecosistemi Connessi, at the Civic Museum of Castelbuono. Could you walk us through the process that led to this project? How do you see the relationship between your work and the museum as an institutional, metabolic, and infrastructural ecosystem? What responsibilities or potential transformations do you see for institutional spaces in hosting such radical ecologies?
AA: We have been working, talking, and discussing with the project curator, Maria Rosa Sossai, as well as with the museum director, Laura Barreca, and Valentina Bruschi, co-curator of the public program, for many years. When they invited us to collaborate and develop a project for the museum, the very first thing we did was to spend a few days closely observing the area where the institution is located. The museum is housed in a large, ancient castle perched on a hill. We immediately realized that this enormous stone structure was already a complex ecosystem, inhabited and nourished by a multitude of life forms. There are several communities of birds, countless ants, molds, reptiles, small trees growing in the cracks in the walls, and so on. As humans, we tend to see this place as sterile, a symbol of history, conservation, display, and production of culture, a place where—as with many other ancient buildings—there is a constant battle against mold, water infiltration, and birds whose droppings stain and corrode the surfaces of the ancient stones. It’s a castle that houses a museum but where the majority of life forms are not human: wild fig trees whose roots penetrate and break down the architecture by absorbing its minerals; molds and algae growing in the humidity trapped in the foundational stones; cliff swallows using the museum walls as if they were a rocky escarpment; multiple species of ants building vast nests in the invisible cavities inside the walls. We intended to begin a process grounded in this complexity. Mindful of The Edible Institute project, we looked at the cultural institution, its complex physical shell, its geological continuation underground as a heterogeneous metabolic substrate that not only hosts but is composed of dense, multispecies relational networks. The Museum welcomed this approach with great openness, and we sensed real enthusiasm from its leadership and curatorship. The post-varietal tomato community inserts itself—grafts itself—into this web of relations, and is, in turn, transformed by them. The uncontrolled cross-hybridization process and its direction (whose outcomes will become visible over the coming years) will largely depend on the interspecies relationships that emerge between the tomatoes and the local life forms, starting, of course, with insects, but also including radical forms of symbiosis, the invisible relationships with fungi, and the bacterial presence in that space, all of which deeply influence plant life.
Birds will also play an important role. In this regard, we asked ourselves: what would happen if birds eat the tomatoes from the post-varietal community and disperse the seeds of a first generation? Will we, in a few years, see tomatoes growing a hundred meters away in a green area next to the museum? Let’s imagine a bird eating a tomato in July, depositing the seed through its droppings, and then, with the autumn rains in September, the seed germinates, the plant grows, and perhaps even tries to bear fruit in November or December. It would seem a trivial and plausible fact, but it is actually unusual, as tomatoes, though perennial in their native regions, are cultivated as annuals in the Mediterranean and, more generally, in so-called “temperate” and “subtropical” zones, with a spring–summer growth cycle; certainly not a summer–autumn one. As a result, tomato plants grown here in Sicily are left to die with the first autumn chills. In recent years, due to rising temperatures linked to climate change and increasingly mild winters, we’ve observed tomato plants here in Sicily bearing fruit even in December. These tomatoes are, therefore, able to survive the winter, becoming perennial. This opens up a consideration that challenges our idea of seasonality and how we cultivate and discipline food plants. Within the cracks opened by climate crisis, unexpected possibilities emerge. But this does not mean we are pleased about climate change. Rather, it means we must learn to live with these new conditions, remaining fully aware that they are, nonetheless, a trap.
One final consideration concerns the way in which cultural institutions are changing. At the Swiss Institute in Rome, where we created edible zones, there is someone specifically in charge of caring for the food plants included in these areas, but members of the production and curatorial teams also take care of them. This has significantly changed their relationship with the institution. For example, someone who works at the Institute’s café and who is originally from South America told us they feel deeply connected to the plants we’ve planted, such as certain varieties of corn. It is interesting to note how even non-human life forms have quickly responded to the presence of vegetables grown in the Institute’s garden. For instance, many peacocks began flying over from Villa Medici to visit the garden of Villa Maraini (home of the Swiss Institute)—something that had never happened before—to taste the vegetables in the edible zones and linger beside them.
Introducing cultivated areas with edible plants into cultural institutions is neither superficial nor simple; nor is it a purely theoretical gesture of embracing radical ecologies. On the contrary, it can lead us to confront very practical issues, such as the fact that edible zones require care, or may force us to imagine new forms of human nourishment within the institution. In the case of the edible zones, some of the vegetables grown are intended to be used in the café, to feed both staff and residents at the Swiss Institute, thus becoming part of the institution’s human metabolic circuit. This leads to a reconsideration of our relationship with the garden, with food plants, with the idea of edibility and ornamentality, and with the circuits of food distribution. And this, of course, triggers a major change, the extent of which we do not yet know, but which we are very interested in experimenting with. It means rethinking roles, practices, and modes of engagement. A central aspect is that institutions should rethink themselves not only as human communities, but as broader communities that also include other forms of life. This carries consequences not only in terms of care but also in terms of positioning and the assumption of responsibility, especially in a context where the effects of climate change are increasingly evident and alarming.
EPILOGUE
As noted in the introduction and throughout the course of the interview, the project has developed within a dense network of collaborations and connections, which underpin not only its realisation but also the vision that animates it. It is following this very trajectory, and in continuity with the reflections on the role and accountability of the institutions that choose to embrace this path of transformation, that I addressed these last questions also to Laura Barreca, Director of the Civic Museum.
LB: The billboard represents a form of reclaiming spaces traditionally assigned to advertising messages. However, while conveying an artistic message through a visually appealing image, the action draws attention to
ecological issues, which are not usually discussed in such spaces. This action is also part of the processual approach implemented within the project Ecosistemi Connessi, which builds upon and continues a trajectory undertaken by the Civic Museum since 2020, when we established the “Garden of Art,” a garden adjacent to the Ventimiglia Castle, home of the Museum. A small plot of land cultivated with the collaboration of a civic association and a recovery community for people with vulnerabilities, which has become a regenerated public green space, dedicated to meetings and educational workshops, a natural extension of the indoor exhibition spaces, continuing the path of knowledge that envisions the museum as part of a broader ecosystem connected to the public realm. The idea of the “metabolic museum” evokes the thought of art critic and anthropologist Cleméntine Deliss, who defines it as a space open to interdisciplinarity, connection, and relationships, capable of welcoming diverse audiences, not only temporary visitors but also students, museum friends, and a population received in a “foyer d’expérience” (M. Foucault). In line with this orientation, we believe that true museum innovation lies in the ability to grasp the transformative nature of cultural heritage in relation to contemporary concerns, extending to disciplinary fields and broader contexts connected to people’s lives, and maintaining a precise reference to pressing issues such as climate change and social inequalities in a synthesis that constructs meaning through an alternative, radical and perhaps utopian narrative based on community participation and the contribution that the museum can make in terms of the sustainable development of social wellbeing. In this open space, conceived as an instrument for the dissemination of the “museal thought,” the possibility of emancipating the very concept of cultural production in an ecological function was tested together with Aterraterra. In this sense, the structure created as part of the project is not included in the permanent collection of the museum as a fetishised object, but as a toolkit, a growth device, a producer of small ecosystems. The challenge is to implement a maintenance process that is necessary for its future durability. The project is an ecological manifesto that expresses the reciprocal relationships within the heritage: a grafting between museum, people, territory, and contemporary creativity.
//
- Image credits
Cover: Aterraterra, Installation View, San Marzano 2, 2025, Typography Carla Selva & Paul Zech, Photo Robert Goodman Photo& Video. Courtesy of the artists and Museo Civico di Castelbuono.
Fig. 1, 3: Aterraterra, Foodscapes 5, 2024, in How like a leaf I am, Alexandra Baumgartner’s exhibition curated by Amelie Schüle, Photoforum Pasquart, Biel-Bienne.
Photo: Daria Somoylova. Courtesy of the artists and Photoforum Pasquart.
Fig. 2: Aterraterra, San Marzano 2, Tomato Study, 2025, Photo Aterraterra. Courtesy of the artists.
