PAV Parco Arte Vivente presents Seeds of Time, the first institutional solo exhibition of Alan Sonfist in Italy curated by Marco Scotini. American artist born in 1946, Alan Sonfist has always placed the relationship between art and ecology at the center of his work with a pioneering practice in the contemporary debate and in the history of the Land Art movement. Seeds of Time delves into Sonfist's early years of activity, focusing on the Sixties and Seventies, highlighting the pioneering aspects of his work. 

In his works and interventions, Sonfist expands the concept of community to non-human beings and conceives his installations as "public monuments" that no longer only look at human history events, but celebrate the entire natural ecosystem, thus revitalizing the history of the environment and the different species of a place. Defining himself as a visual archaeologist capable of bringing the past into the present, Sonfist often collaborates closely with scientists, biologists, politicians, urban planners, architects in a collective practice that can last for years before reaching complete formalization. Unlike Land Art artists, Sonfist always maintains a central interest in the interaction of nature in urban ecosystems, a concept considered rather radical at the time, leading him to view the present as a complex ecosystem rooted not only in human history, but also in plant, animal, and mineral history. 

Seeds of Time opens with a new installation commissioned to Sonfist for this exhibition. Growth Between the Cracks (2025) is a work that arises from the participation of the local community, invited by the artist to collect samples of soil within the perimeter of the city of Turin in the cracks of the asphalt, in the interstices of the sidewalks, and in the usually ignored liminal spaces. The installation is part of a broader research that the artist has been carrying out since 1969, starting by photographing nature making its way into the urban fabric of New York to find traces of ancient forests. In this version created in Turin, the plants and seeds contained in the collected soil, subsequently brought to PAV, constitute a fragmented mapping of the city, a core drilling that tells the story of a street or a neighborhood through the presence of native plants or those that testify to migrations sometimes dating back to distant eras or geographies.