Colonial ambitions generated imperial attitudes, theories and practices that remain embedded in botany and all the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, indigenous studies and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how fundamental theories and practices of botany were shaped and reinforced in favour of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how the colonisers erased the deep history of plants to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants as foreign human beings. Subramanian thus focuses on imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany, untethered and decentralised from its origins in histories of racism, slavery and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of scientific and feminist thought to chart a course towards more socially just experimental biology practices.

Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science in relation to experimental biology. She is the author of Ghost Stories for Darwin. The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Holy Science. The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), his current work focuses on the decolonisation of botany, nativism in plant biology and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India.

It all begins with a trip to Latvia. An aeroplane, a wait, a very long sentence that does not stop, made of images and sounds, of places and thoughts, of uprooting and taking possession of the alien, this sentence that sings while it tells, that sees while it closes its eyes, that takes us with it and never leaves us alone, never behind, never distracted, that however relieves us from the present and invites us to the fun of the journey, of the unexpected encounter, in a Latvia that like a sphere reflects the whole universe on its chrome surface.

Sara Fruner, born in Riva del Garda, has lived in New York since 2017, where she teaches Italian at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her articles on cinema, art and literature have appeared in La Voce di New York, CinematoGraphie, Magazzino 23, Brick. He has collaborated with the Center for Italian Modern Art and Magazzino Italian Art, and has recently translated works by Marie-Helene Bertino, Jane Hirshfield and W.S. Merwin. He is a Professional Member of the Authors Guild and a Bogliasco Fellow. L'istante largo, her debut novel (Bollati Boringhieri, 2020 and 2022), won her second place in the 2021 Severino Cesari Opera Prima National Prize. In poetry she alternates between volumes in Italian and English: Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills (2018), Fireflies in the Palm of the Night (2019), The Red Schooner (2023).

Luigi Mainolfi (Rotondi, Feb. 16, 1948) is an Italian sculptor who is internationally known as one of the main representatives of the so-called post-conceptual sculpture, which was imposed at the beginning of the 1980s.

Over twenty sculptures by Luigi Mainolfi, created between 1978 and 2020, were housed in the Court of Honor, the Grand Parterre of the Gardens of the Reggia di Venaria and the Chapel of St. Hubert in the summer of 2024.

From the zoomorphic-themed sculptures comes the title, Bestiary, which refers to medieval illuminated codices illustrated with real and imaginary animals, but also to the fantastic zoology of Jorge Luis Borges. This is a recurring theme in Mainolfi, already the author of Bestiario del Sole with its polychrome metamorphic creatures between myth and fairy tale. Mainolfi's Bestiary settles into the architecture, invades the green geometries of the gardens and comes into contact with the living presence of fawns and other wildlife in the park and surrounding forest. Fantastic and mutant creatures, in dialogue with the fairy tales and modeled and painted animals of the Reggia di Venaria, entirely dedicated in the 17th century to the myth of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Luigi Mainolfi (1948) practices sculpture made with natural materials such as terracotta, plaster, wood, lava stone, or bronze castings, elaborating his own personal language through which he evokes the popular cultures of our country.

Exhibition: Mainolfi. Sculptures. Bestiary
La Venaria Reale, Venaria, Turin, 21th June 2024 - 10th November 2024

One of the most singular figures in Italian post-World War II art, ‘an artist who moves in a vacuum’ as Germano Celant defined him, Prini seems to elude, perhaps intentionally, any possible definition. Starting with over forty works from 1966 to 2016, the core of the first retrospective since his death, held at the Fondazione Merz from 28 October 2019 to 9 February 2020, this volume activates a critical and historical reflection on the experience of one of the most interesting and discussed representatives of Arte Povera. A transgressive position, that of Prini, or if we want orthodox towards artistic practice and the codes of the art system that teaches the possibility of grasping the value of contradiction and doubt. A passage of art and the artist into life, or rather as he himself defined ‘not action but biological extension of the self’, into contemporaneity that distinguishes a work of extreme topicality and ready for confrontation with the new generations.

The book, edited by Beatrice Merz, includes an unpublished text by Luca Lo Pinto, a historical and never published dialogue between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a rich anthology with texts by Adachiara Zevi, Germano Celant and Lorenzo Benedetti. The book benefits from a rich iconographic apparatus, with over 150 images of works and documents.

Emilio Prini (Stresa, 1943 - Rome, 2016) was a leading figure in Arte Povera, one of the most influential and radical recent art movements, strongly connected to the political and social context of the second half of the 20th century.

Approximately where the 44th parallel North intersects the 8th meridian East, there is a place of memory that Marco Drago brings to life on the page with masterly skill. Drago summons his human beings into a kind of living nativity scene that has a Brewery instead of the Child. As much as this author's writing has an immediate grasp on the reader, skimming in its snappy journeys, concrete to the point of being decoded first by bodies and only later by minds, the outcome of each of his texts contains a compressed and compact worldview and a vision of life that is painful but amused, desolate but sumptuous, sarcastic but passionate - desperate and mystical.

Drago (like all those with a pure talent for writing) is inimitable in many ways. In particular, he has a mysterious ability that allows him to totally overturn the relationship between what we mean by ‘person’ and what we mean by ‘character’, i.e. between his pages live and meet people who everything suggests were in real life (beautiful) characters. Each one with a tic, or a fantasy, or an unmentionable disappointment, or a weakness, or a stigma, or an identity adherence to transient social roles, or an invincible drive, an artistic talent to dissipate, a falling in love.

In his nativity scene, people of beautiful interiority coexist with the more drifting outcasts. All in the bowl of life and time shredder. All loved and mocked in a single gesture by the author. We readers also converge around the brewery, because we feel that there is a buried pulsation there and perceive that only a writer like Marco Drago can make it so immediate.

Dry, poignant, definitive is the finale of this small and universal Bohème.

Marco Drago is a writer, translator and radio presenter. He has published: L'amico del pazzo e altri racconti (Feltrinelli, 1998), Cronache da chissà dove (Minimum Fax, 2000), Domenica sera (Feltrinelli, 2001), Zolle (Feltrinelli, 2005), La vita moderna è rumenta (Feltrinelli, 2012), La prigione grande quanto un paese (Barbera Editore, 2013), Baladin, la birra artigianale è tutta colpa di Teo, with Teo Musso (Feltrinelli, 2013), Sesso calcio e rock and roll (Feltrinelli, 2014) and Innamorato (Bollati Boringhieri, 2023). He has translated many books from English for major Italian publishers. Between 2000 and 2025 he wrote and hosted radio programmes with Gaetano Cappa for RadioRai, Radio24 and RSI. He is part of the artistic factory Istituto Barlumen.

A green thread links the cherry blossoms in Japan to the gum trees of Malaysia, the botanical gardens of Singapore and the destroyed Perfect Brightness - a green thread that defines the anthropocene and the way nature is plundered, for its immediate utility and to create symbolism in step with current ideologies.
In this volume we look at the stories of our times, seen through the petals of flowers chosen to represent a nation, with the desire to bend a small fragrant corolla to ideologies useful to those in government at the time. They are also the stories of how our poetic images clash against our inability to live without destroying what surrounds us. Through the symbolism of flowers and gardens we talk about politics and history, colonialism and ecology, nationalism and authoritarianism, in an anthropocene short-circuit.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, journalist, poet and ceramist, and has lived in Asia since 1988. She completed her studies in Beijing and London, then moved to Tokyo, and later based in Hong Kong - meanwhile spending long periods in Shanghai, Kathmandu and Dakar. She is the author of four books: the first, Il Dio dell'Asia, religione e politica in Oriente (Il Saggiatore, 2006) won the Brice Chatwin Prize for travel literature; Lettere dalla Cina (Una Città, 2011); Beijing 1989 (Una Città, 2019); L'Eclissi di Hong Kong, topografia di una città in tumulto (ADD Editore, 2022). He contributes to numerous newspapers, both Italian and international, including Il Domani, Internazionale, Il Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others, and is a member of the Lettera 22 association of journalists.