TURIN, Italy — In 1902, Russian naturalist, zoologist, and anarchist Piotr Kropotkin published a treatise titled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which (to drastically simplify) turns Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” notion on its head. Kropotkin outlines examples of animals, plants, and human communities he had observed in his travels to places like Siberia, cooperating and collaborating to survive and evolve in life’s struggles, rather than competing for resources.
Kropotkin’s ideas of symbiotic creation were a conceptual starting point for the exhibition Mutual Aid: Art in Collaboration with Nature at Castello di Rivoli. The curators — the Castello’s new director, Francesco Manacorda, and Marianna Vecellio — chose works by more than 20 artists and their many nonhuman collaborators to illustrate how co-creation can unfold between human and nonhuman creatures (the latter duly listed by species on the artist register; Lumbricus terrestris or Nerium oleander are just two examples).
The longitudinal choreography of the exhibition, located in the Castello’s Manica Lunga, an elongated architectural structure built in the first half of the 16th century, opens with Argentina-born artist Vivian Suter’s frameless, large-scale canvases suspended from the ceiling. Her paintings are colorful abstracts that she leaves outside her home in a Guatemala rainforest for nature to modify. Suter surrenders her sole authorship to the traces of weather and animals, including her dogs. Here, the works seem like jaunty welcome banners.
Nearby, two groupings of artworks look back to the early days of conceptual nature-artist interactions, starting with Turin-based Giuseppe Penone, who in the 1960s famously placed a bronze cast of his own hand into an ash tree; over the years, the tree grew around the intervention, which he titled “Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto” or “It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point” (1968–2003). In this show we see a similar piece with a walnut tree. Seminal land artist Agnes Denes also makes an appearance, with photographs of trees chained together (part of the “Rice/Tree/Burial” project she executed for decades, beginning in the 1970s) as well as documentation of her classic reforestation project “Tree Mountain: A Living Capsule,” started in 1982. For this work, 11,000 individuals each planted a tree in a spiral formation on a manmade mountain in Finland.
A group of spiderwebs dusted with graphic powder are attributed to Argentina-born Tomas Saraceno, along with the many species of arachnids he keeps in his studio in Berlin. As the exhibition unfolds, viewers see other organisms nudged by human intervention into doing what they normally do, to artistic effect: French artist Hubert Duprat supplies caddisfly larvae, who build tiny protective tubes when in natural waters, with minuscule gemstones and bits of gold; here, they have created stunningly beautiful little jewels. Renato Leotta gives underwater plankton the opportunity to take unintentional self-portraits by tracing their movements in ocean water with photosensitive paper.
There’s much more, including Yiannis Maniatakos’s paintings made underwater in the Aegean; Nour Mobarak’s polyphonic myceleum sculptures; Michel Blazy’s “Le lâcher d’escargots” (The snail release, 2009), an oversized carpet hugging wall and floor and adorned with deliciously curvy white slime trails created by slow-moving snails; and Aki Inomata’s vertical sculptures based on the bite patterns of Eurasian beavers — when copied by a sculptor and tripled in size, the water mammals’ works vaguely echo Brancusi’s lexicon of shapes. The show ends in a literal hothouse: Precious Okomoyon’s “The sun eats her children” (2023) is an overheated tropical biotope. Exotic black butterflies float through the humid air, alighting on invasive, poisonous plants anchored in fertile earth. Along the path through this climate-controlled ecosystem is an outsized, furry animatronic toy bear that at first appears to be sleeping, then every so often opens its artificial eyes and lets out a shriek.
Retracing my steps, I was struck by the optimism inherent in art emerging from interspecies collaborations, some of which will continue to evolve, metabolize, or decay over the course of the show’s run, perhaps making a few of these pieces a new form of time-based art. But as intriguing as the show’s premises are, the many works don’t add up to a particularly cohesive whole — although it’s unclear whether that was ever the point. Those of us who frequent mega-exhibitions have seen some of these artworks before, by Okomoyon, Saraceno, and others. And are they really collaborations? The majority of this art is still based on human manipulations of or interventions into natural processes — some of the “aid” here feels, to put it into political terms, far less reciprocal than nonconsensual. I was reminded of the work of Hong Kong-based artist Zheng Bo that was exhibited at Gropius Bau in Berlin a few years back. In one of the discursive events attached to his 2020 residency there, a question arose on the recent art-institutional focus on the “more-than-human”: “Why do we think a human cultural institution should cater to nonhuman species? Maybe they would tell us they don’t care, or maybe the earth would say ‘get this building off me.’”
Mutual Aid is worth seeing to take in the range of human/nature collaborations that so many excellent artists have conjured — this is apparently the first institutional show to assemble only collaborative human/nonhuman works — or to contemplate the future potentials of such cooperation. But I came away thinking that Darwin’s old ideas have soundly triumphed over Kropotkin’s fin de siecle declarations and dreams. We have not yet reached the point at which homo sapiens has the capacity to truly honor ideas of “fostering care,” as stated in the exhibition materials (and “care” feels like an art-world trope that peaked a few years ago) — in art, and certainly not in the real world under current circumstances. Even in the context of this show, human dominance is going strong. At least for now.
Mutual Aid: Art in Collaboration with Nature continues at the Castello di Rivoli (Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Turin, Italy) through March 23. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio.
Editor’s Note, 2/26/2025: Some travel for the author was paid for by Castello di Rivoli and Pinacoteca Agnelli.
