The PAV Parco Arte Vivente presents On copper, wax, iron, wisteria and ice. Elena Mazzi: 10 years of smellscapes, labs and conversations , personal exhibition of the artist Elena Mazzi curated by Marco Scotini . The relationship between the territories at risk and the communities that inhabit them triggers the practices of Elena Mazzi (1984), which deconstruct and challenge the epistemic dichotomies of modernity, urging us to think of a new ecological relationship between nature, culture and the world; Mazzi collects case studies in the field, workplaces, portable laboratories, implements different sets of procedures, interdisciplinary exchanges, indigenous and specialized vocabularies, to overcome the limits of the areas in which knowledge is produced and is produced. Following the contrast between “state science” and “nomadic science” (Deleuze and Guattari), we could attach Elena Mazzi's research to the latter theoretical model.

Mazzi introduces himself to the artistic, anthropological and scientific fields with a “minor” approach, with a rhizomatic approach in which the circumstances, from time to time, bring out the toolkits, the disciplinary links and the possible interlocutors. The goal is to find an unconventional response to ecological urgencies, to neoliberal extractivism, to the collapse of biodiversity, looking for new imaginaries of interconnection, intersection and mutual dependence, beyond the cognitive monopoly of Western knowledge. The strategic horizon of his work, in terms of contents and methodologies, is to sensitize the subjectivities involved to the importance of the ecosystem dimension and of the “circulating entities” (Bruno Latour) that populate society.

The title of the exhibition indicates precisely this additive process of multiple laboratories based on raw materials. By combining the visual arts with solutions and tactics from disciplines such as geography, social sciences and anthropology, in Elena Mazzi's work, artistic practice becomes action within communities.