Visiting an exhibition and finding yourself leafing through a family album, in which what comes to life before our eyes are not private memories but the collective and changing memories of our relationships with plants over the course of over 6 centuries. In Parma , in the splendid setting of the Governor's Palace , Impronte opens to the public on Saturday 13 January 2024 . Us and the plants (noielepiante.it), a one - of -a - kind exhibition that traces the inexhaustible relationship that it links humanity and nature, botany and images, science and art.

Created by the University of Parma in collaboration with the Municipality of Parma and the support of the Cariparma Foundation , Chiesi Group and Davines Group , Impronte unravels in its 10 sections the thread of natural memory that man has always tried to grasp and fix, from map of the herbariums to today's satellite images of tree censuses, passing through illustrations, notebooks, models and even magnetic resonance imaging and X-ray views. At the centre, an ideal and concrete connection between the eras, the audiovisual installation Artificial Botany , curated by fuse * , which explores the suggestions and expressive capabilities of classic botanical illustrations through the use of modern machine learning algorithms.

Many works on display bring to light the relationships between botanical imagery and the city, from the herbariums of illustrious figures determined to give the right value to botanical knowledge (such as Luigi Gardoni , whose homonymous pharmaceutical herbarium was brought to light only in 2014 after a silent stay in the cupboards of the Botanical Garden for more than a century), to the "royal donation" of wax mushroom models purchased by Maria Luigia of Austria for the Botanical Garden, passing through stories , news and curiosities contained in the equally large digital universe composed of QR-codes and videos .

The origin of the materials is rich and varied, which in addition to local providers has involved foreign structures (Real Jardin Botanico of Madrid) and first-rate ones in Italy (Botanical Gardens of Padua, Bologna, Pavia, Central Italian Herbarium of Florence, among others ). At the center of the exhibition itinerary, however, is the scientific depiction of plants and its transformation of style, perception and objectives: a journey that uses the lever of beauty to show how much our way of looking at plants has changed over the centuries. and, with it, our opinion on them.