Giovanni Aloi
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Associate Professor, Adjunct
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an art historian specializing in the history and theory of photography, representation of nature, and everyday objects in art. He has published with Columbia University Press, Phaidon, Laurence King, and Prestel and has been appointed co-editor of the University of Minnesota series Art after Nature. Since 2006, he has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). He currently lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and London.
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Essays by Giovanni Aloi
This article traces the evolution of plant-based practices from early gestures such as Edward Steichen’s monumental floral installations at MoMA and Hélio Oiticica’s immersive Tropicália to more recent, politically attuned uses of live plants by artists like Rashid Johnson, Kapwani Kiwanga, Otobong Nkanga, and Precious Okoyomon. These artists mobilize plants to confront histories of colonialism, ecological extraction, and racial displacement, transforming plants into vectors of social memory and instruments of critique. Further, through the work of Maria Thereza Alves, Egle Oddo, and Paul Harfleet, the article explores how gardening and planting become insurgent acts of care, recovery, and resistance. Across these practices, plants are not decorative or symbolic: they are material and temporal forces that challenge the neutrality of space, enact political gestures, and reclaim visibility for the vulnerable. Through a rich analysis of recent artworks, this essay reveals how the vegetal has taken root as one of contemporary art’s most vital and transformative languages.
USA by Giovanni Aloi and Andrew S. Yang, authors, educators
and makers who specialise in the representation of nature in art.
Aloi and Yang jointly organised Earthly Observatory, an exhibition
which brought together examples from the practices of 30
artists/contributors. Here, Aloi and Yang re ect on the genesis of
the project, its ambitions and how it contributes to the
contemporary understanding of practice. They emphasise their
commitment to transdisciplinarity as the optimal means to
engage the non-human and explain how they arrived at the
exhibition’s ve thematics: Conditions of Representation; Seeing,
Making, Tracing; Relative Visibilities; Vulnerability and Communality;
and Down to Earth. Aloi and Yang analyse how each imposed
order on a wide variety of thought-provoking works lling six
gallery spaces. The thematics also gave Earthly Observatory its
sense of cohesion. Each tapped the potential for practice of
Donna Haraway’s in uential description of partial perspectives.
Once adopted, situatedness– being somewhere in particular–
challenges the panoptic power of epistemological traditions
stretching back in Western thinking for millennia which have
enforced the ctitious separation between nature and culture.
draws on the memories and dreams of the local inhabitants to narrate the post-industrial development of the area and the intricate web of relationships that permeate it. Gathering a variety of documents, 'La Montagna Magica' outlines the history of asbestos, a mineral considered miraculous since ancient times and a part of everyday life in the last century, now recognized as lethal, yet still in use in many countries around the world.
This extended version of the original text was published in Antennae issue #64 - 'Queering Nature' as an editorial
No other tree has haunted for millennia human imagination as palms.
The long history of palm representation across the world, despite the multifarious styles and approaches, could be divided into three main categories: Divinity, Escapism, and Criticality. To a certain degree, these categories blend and intermingle, but their conceptual roots remain firmly planted in our relationship with the world. This is what makes the representation of palms so iconic and rich.
Speculative phytopoetics requires closeness, constancy, patience, and determination. It is a set of non-verbal, non-written biosemiotic codes we develop in collaboration with individual plants in our homes. It constitutes the perceptible framework of the plant identity—one dispersed among branches and leaves and extended across the geography of the domestic space that plants share with us.
From the article: "The individuality of pets emerges from many factors. Our day-to-day closeness and recurring manifestation of desires and fears. Is the individual character of a plant indissolubly enmeshed with the time we spend looking at it? Should we look harder? If we looked at a cactus intensely enough, not to find beauty in a classic-gardening sense but to discern the traits that make the plant unique, what could we learn?
Lee’s paintings invite us to discover the identity and character of cacti—the heightened focus, the sustained attention to detail, the emphasis on nuances and idiosyncrasies. They remind us that most of the identity of a plant is superficial. Not in the sense that it is shallow, but that it resides on the surface of leaves, petals, and branches. In order to perceive it we need to retune our gaze and attention".
The article considers the layers of intertextuality involved in the environmentalist attack of the Laocoön that took place on August 18th, 2022.
Weeds are symbolically charged like no other category of plants. It is because they are ontologically defined by the economies of human geographies that they have more recently infiltrated contemporary art. In our time, conflict is more than ever grounded in new conceptions of territory, invasion, and appropriation—quantities that are magnified and often distorted by social media. It is therefore not a surprise that the complex anthropomorphism that weeds inscribe powerfully resounds with the European migrant crisis, the marginalization of minority groups, waves of the diasporas in the Middle East, and issues of social injustice in the urban context, just to name a few. Therefore, in art a weed no longer is just “a plant out of place” but it embodies a radical kind of otherness. An uncelebrated symbol of resistance, the weed withstands capitalist forces by refusing to comply with aesthetic standards, geographic constriction, social hierarchies, and economic values. This article explores the resilience of weeds in contemporary art through the work of, among others, Jin Lee, Zachari Logan, Precious Okoyomon, Mona Caron, and Zheng Bo.
The lawn—a quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping—is at the center of a climate change controversy. The high carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weed killers and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted mounting criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement in the US. Amidst the rise of concern for global warming and drier conditions, lawns are being converted to native meadows in the Midwest and to astroturf in the South and West Coast.
How did the lawn become such a cultural icon in the West? The unexpected answer lies in the 18th century paintings by John Constable, Antoine Watteau, Canaletto, Jon Varley, and a plethora of 19th century engravings that celebrated the opulent splendor of villas and mansions. It was artists, not just gardeners, who popularized the lawn and today they are determined to make us rethink our fixation with our notorious carpets of green.
This article maps the history of the lawn in art, beginning with its origin as a mark of aristocratic distinction in 17th century England and France, examining its ubiquitousness across suburban America, and ending with the work of contemporary artists who critically address the lawn and grass from critical and climate change-grounded perspectives like Lois Weinberger, Mel Chin, Martin Roth, Linda Tegg, Frances Whitehead, and Diana Scherer.
Cecilia Alemani has curated a “Posthuman Biennale”, so the worldwide press reports. The New York-based curator used the term posthuman at the opening press conference and also gave Rosi Braidotti—the posthuman Italian pioneer—a special mention. While to art audiences, posthumanism might sound new and cutting edge, or even outright mysterious—the latest trend in a post-COVID world that’s lost faith in itself—the posthuman revolution has been causing a stir in academia for over 40 years and its roots reach far deeper into 1960s western philosophy and early modern art.
Earthly Observatory explores how we sense, portray, and engage our deep planetary entanglements. Through crafted visions, close listening, and histories of conquest and protest, the exhibition examines the contested relations of ecology to economy, aesthetics to ethics that dominate our experience at one moment, and evades awareness in the next. Drawn from diverse practices across art, design, and the natural sciences, the works invite us to question the ways that we—as one among many earthlings—create our understanding of a manifold world.
Inspired by the work of African American photographer Roy DeCarava and the poetry of Langston Hughes, Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly Black series provides a blueprint for the kind of political art our time truly needs. The series of darkened gelatine silver prints visualizes the Underground Railroad – a network of safe houses and locations across the Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio landscapes in which fugitive slaves could find shelter on their way towards Lake Erie and the final fifty-mile passage to freedom in Canada.
Leaving people entirely out of the picture, Bey makes his political statement through images of an often eerie and ambiguous American landscape at twilight. Across the series, non-affirmative aesthetics are entrusted with the task of revealing the inherent white supremacist power-structures that have defined three hundred years of European and American landscape painting.