by muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi
Garden of Palazzo Capponi-Incontri, Florenz
In collaboration with Hannah Baader, Costanza Caraffa, Dorit Malz, Gerhard Wolf and KHI’s Garden Commission, and curated by Angelika Stepken and Tina Plokarz
April 2024 to November 2026
Abolition Garden is a growing garden, a living anti-monument, and an artistic research project by Brazilian artist muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi. Planted in spring 2024 in the garden of KHI’s Palazzo Capponi-Incontri, the installation is dedicated to Black radical thought and resistance stories throughout the process of the abolition of slavery in Brazil (legally ended in 1888). Abolition Garden marks an important step in the artist’s creative practice: Instead of incorporating colonial wounds and scars into, and subverting them through, her own black female body, Mattiuzzi poetically translates her performative gesture towards the visualization of resistance in a set of tangible formations.
Valuing plants both as spiritual objects and as intangible elements of resistance, Abolition Garden reveals the significance of popular epistemology in preserving culture and writing history. The garden installation becomes a metaphorical seeding ground for performing resistance and a remedy for combating racism today.
Abolition Garden will be accompanied by a series of events and conversations, considering ongoing research on historical gardens and monuments, indigenous healing practices and commemoration, ecology, decolonization initiatives in the archives, as well as debates in contemporary performance art, and Black radical thinking.
https://www.studiomusa.art/en/
More information about the exhibition and programming here.
