Wednesday 16 March 2022 , from 6.00 pm, AlbumArte , an independent space for contemporary art, will inaugurate the solo exhibition WE ARE THE GARDEN , a site-specific project by Slovak artist Oto Hudec (Košice, SK, 1981) in his first solo exhibition in Italy. The exhibition, curated by Lýdia Pribišová, currently curator of the Kunsthalle in Bratislava, will be open until April 22, 2022.

WE ARE THE GARDEN addresses the issue of climate change, the ecosystem and the damage caused by anthropocentrism on earth .

On display, Oto Hudec presents a self-sufficient (or rather survival) model of life in a dystopian vision of the near future, after the fatal consequences of the climate crisis have affected life on Earth. At the heart of the project is a scaled-down replica of the artist's royal cottage in his garden in eastern Slovakia, connected to a greenhouse to create a closed system. The plants in the greenhouse produce oxygen for the inhabitants of the house and also provide a source of nutrition, while the carbon dioxide they exhale keeps the plants alive. People in the cottage are inextricably linked to the garden in the greenhouse, they are part of it. The one depends on the other.

The exhibition is built around the story of a man and a girl who live in this future environment. It tells of their daily struggle against high temperatures, dusty and unbreathable air, windstorms without precipitation and toxic substances in a land devastated by human activity. The story also describes how it all began: the changes were initially imperceptible, almost unnoticed; insects gradually disappeared from the landscape, the weather changed more rapidly, summers became unbearably hot, winters surprisingly cold, floods and fires were more frequent.