The first cycle of exhibitions and events proposed by RADICETERNA closes with an exhibition by Ignazio Mortellaro. The creator, together with Valentina Bruschi and Vittorio Rappa, of the entire project for the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art hosted in the eighteenth-century spaces of the Calidarium of Palermo’s Botanical Garden, Mortellaro is an eclectic and versatile artist in the Renaissance sense, a man of letters and an engineer. For the exhibition entitled E già sono deserto – which is complemented by this book full of texts and references – he conceives a new objectification for the term desert, understood as landscape, a place of extreme atomisation, free space and ever-changing labyrinth. The reflections on human and cosmic natures, the literary and geographical references, become narratives on time and its many forms and dimensions.

The third volume of the RADICETERNA series, which accompanies the programme of exhibitions and events inspired by Mario Merz’s Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna (While form disappears its Root is eternal), is dedicated to the new project for the Palermo space conceived by the German artist Björn Braun. Braun’s works oscillate, in search of balance, between Nature and Culture, the natural and artificial, proposing collages and sculptures in which the artist’s working method gives no ground to waste, to the unused, and instead proposes a continuous and careful re-elaboration and dynamisation, even of the smallest elements and residues of life, experience or creation. This new project strengthens the relationship between the project room in the eighteenth-century Calidarium, which houses the works of contemporary artists, and the luminous reading room, which contains the books on art and nature that are forming a specialised library open to all, thanks to donations from private citizens, artists and Italian and international institutions.

The second booklet in the RADICETERNA series is dedicated to Katinka Bock. For the programme of research and the promotion of contemporary art that sees its first realisation in the Botanical Garden of Palermo, the German artist proposes a series of new works, especially conceived for the space of the Calidarium. Popolazione (lines and straight lines), is a composite sculpture inspired by and derived from residual natural elements of the Botanical Garden, collected and used as a base for forms designed by nature itself. The Calidarium in Palermo’s Botanical Garden, originally a heated greenhouse to allow certain plant species to survive the rigours of winter, takes on a new value as a place of care and an incubator of ideas thanks to the artists involved in the project, suitable for sheltering thoughts, experiences and narratives.

The first volume of the series inaugurating the collaboration between hopefulmonster and RADICETERNA – a series bearing the same name as the cultural association responsible for the creation of exhibitions and events, curated by Valentina Bruschi, Ignazio Mortellaro and Vittorio Rappa, in the Botanical Gardens of Palermo – is dedicated to the work of the artistic duo consisting of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. The installation called The Great Silence, a complex video work capable of narrating the relationship that human beings have with nature and the world in an original way, maintains a dialogue with the space of the historic Calidarium or hothouse in the Botanical Garden, transformed into a place of study and meditation by the project through the presence of works of art relating to the theme of nature and of a library open to the public entirely devoted to texts on works by contemporary artists who have been inspired by nature.