Nature, Art and Habitat: Lecture with Gabi Scardi

Gabi Scardi, Milan-based curator, art critic and author, has accepted the invitation of the Les community to speak about her work for the Nature residency program, Art & Habitat (NAHR), an upcoming call for artists on the theme of land, and about artistic research on interspecies coexistence and architecture in general.

Residency Nature, Art & Habitat / www.nahr. it /, or also the ECO-laboratory of multidisciplinary practice (𝘈𝘯 𝘌𝘊𝘖-𝘓𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘗𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦), is located in the Taleggio Valley in the Italian province of Bergamo. Its main activity is a summer residency program that aims to develop and present a sensitive kind of culture that relates to nature as a source of inspiration and a measure of available resources. The NAHR residency aims to reveal the delicate relationships between all living organisms and to highlight the possibilities of resilient development that allows humans and nature to coexist.

The NAHR programme supports deep research into the environment and its functions. It looks macroscopically at the Earth’s ecosystems – climate, geology, soil, water, air, sun – and then finds their microscopic reflection in the natural features of the Taleggio Valley and its flowers, ferns, bees, pebbles, barns, villagers, shops, and so on. Each year NAHR invites participants to focus on a different component of nature. Past themes have included Forests, Rock and Stone, Water, and Grasslands. NAHR was founded by Italian architect Ilaria Mazzoneli. The organisation works closely with a range of experts from different disciplines: architects, artists, scientists, dancers and farmers.

Gabi Scardi is an art critic, curator and book author. Her main area of interest is art and its overlaps with anthropology, architecture, design and urban culture. Scardi has served as advisor for the Fine Arts of the Province of Milan and curator of the National Museum of 21st Century Art MAXXI. She has collaborated with numerous art institutions and museums in Italy and abroad. She lectures at several universities and art schools, such as the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, and the IED – European Institute of Design, Fashion and Visual Arts. Her projects include the restoration of Alberto Burri’s sculpture “Teatro Continuo”. Since 2011 she has been curator of the nctm e l’arte project. She also writes books, contributes reviews to magazines and is represented in a large number of publications and exhibition catalogues. Since 2020 Scardi has been co-editor of Animot, a journal that explores the theme of animality in the light of animal studies and promotes a dialogue between philosophy, architecture, natural sciences and art history, political theory and literature. She is president of the NAHR residency program.

The lecture is jointly prepared by Les – a community for cultivation, theory and art, in collaboration with the Studio of Free Art I (Sculpture) at UMPRUM, Prague, Are and the Institute of Anxiety.

The event is produced as part of the year-long festival programme mushroom descendants and the (eco)politics of sharing. Festival is organized by the collective Les – a community for cultivation, theory and art and in collaboration with Are and the Anxiety Institute.

The project is realized with the support of the City of Prague, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Municipality of Prague 7 and the State Fund for Culture.