The PAV is pleased to present the sixth edition of the Teatrum Botanicum festival and the exhibition titled Recombinant Ecologies, events dedicated to emerging artists whose practices are linked to ecological themes.

The exhibition, curated by Andris Brinkmanis, Course Leader of the Triennium in Painting and Visual Arts at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, addresses the concept of Recombinant Ecologies - introduced by Stephen Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore in 2006 - which refers to environments where various life forms coexist in unexpected ways due to climate change in the Anthropocene era. The ideal stages for this phenomenon are cities, from urban centers to suburbs, which are invaded by animal species that previously had their natural habitats elsewhere due to environmental disasters. However, the exhibition does not only focus on the proposal put forward by the two theorists, but aims to broaden the perspective towards various phenomena of hybridization and coexistence among different life forms.

The collective presents the different visions of the artists on display, students and alumni of the Visual Arts Department at the Milan campus of NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Gabriele Carrera, Elisa Ceneri, Martina Ferrari, Edna Gee, Arianna Maria Leva, Nicolò Minisi, Giacomo Segantin, Mario Uliassi, and Filippo B. Chilelli (Collettivo Pessima), who, by providing a personal panorama of the current situation of ecological themes, shape a plurality of contexts and points of view. The festival also includes the performative works of other students and alumni from the Visual Arts Area of NABA, Penelope Andronico, Nicolò Minisi, Marte Gastaldello, and Marlee Wilson, along with Luca Frati and Simona Coltello (Collettivo Pessima), generating symbiotic and relational moments between the space, both physical and mental, and the recombined bodies.

This is how new hybridized lives are generated: creatures that usually lived in uncontaminated spaces migrate to urban environments; new minerals, the result of an evolutionary anthropocentrism; different economic systems that assume defined and recombining roles, and the entire queer and eco-queer panorama that fluidifies identity paradigms and liminal landscapes.

In this context, awareness of these phenomena allows us to look at the environment, urban and non-urban, from a new perspective, overcoming the dichotomy between natural and cultural realms. There is no longer an untouched nature that does not also reflect political, social, and cultural changes, but perhaps, for this reason, new generations have a different relationship with natural elements, a relationship that we could define as fluid, queer, a kind of adaptive interspeciesism where identity and status quo are always hybrid and constantly changing.