Fiori di fuoco

Testimoni delle ceneri

Anaïs Tondeur

in collaboration with
Michael Marder

Interweaving photography and ecology, botany and philosophy, this project is developed in companionship with ruderal plants growing in extreme soils of the Anthropocene, the Terra dei Fuochi and the volcanic area of Vesuvius, in the Naples region.
 
Cultivated during an artist residency at Spot Home Gallery in Naples, under the guidance of scientists and inhabitants of the area, Fiori di fuoco takes the form of a correspondence between the artist Anaïs Tondeur, the philosopher Michael Marder, and communities of plants which, in Roman times, cured people before the eruption of Vesuvius, and today participate in the healing of soils marked by the consequences of the incineration and burial of toxic waste in the depths of the region.
 
According to certain botanists, ruderal plants overproduce a molecule known as phenol when growing in heavily polluted soil. Via the photographic gesture, Anaïs Tondeur collects this excess of phenol using a process known as phytography. Without extracting the plants from their soil, she relies on sunlight to expose their bodies, and on a natural chemical reaction between the phenolic molecules and the photosensitive surface – a paper or textile collected from landfills and photosensitized to light.
 
Reviving the ritual of the poet and herbalist Emily Dickinson, who enclosed dried plants in her correspondence (or sometimes included her poems in flower arrangements), the photographer sends these other-than-human writings to the philosopher Michael Marder, who responds with a series of letters addressed to each plant. After receiving the letters, the photographer returns to the plant to read the philosopher’s words, while collecting a new phytography of the plant.
 
From leaf to leaf, through words and images, these gestures are created in the sense of the medieval etymology of the term ‘correspondence’: ‘to harmonise with’, ‘to enter into a relation with’. In this way, the philosopher and the photographer open up spaces for encounters with these plants of the margins, forgotten by our ecological unconscious. In a landfill turned into an open-air photographic laboratory, they weave intimate bonds with these expressions of ecological vitality which grow in the ruins of capitalism.
 
 
 
 
Anaïs Tondeur is the second artist-in-residence at Spot Home Gallery, following Swedish master Anders Petersen. The choice confirms the gallery’s commitment to support artists in creating new, personal works inspired by and realized in Naples and Campania.
 
The project was supported by:
Spot home gallery, Naples – French Institute’s MIRA program, International Mobility for Artistic Research –
Prix Photographie & Sciences initiated by the Résidence 1+2, the French Ministry of Culture, Adagp, CNRS, Stimultania (associated venue) and Picto Foundation, as well as media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche.

Alliaria Petiolata, Acerra, Canale dei Regi Lagni

Sonchus oleraceus, Giugliano, zona industriale, ex discarica Resit

Amaranthus, Villa Literno, Sito stoccaggio provvisorio rifiuti imballati, Taverna del Re