Cotangent Awarded Residency Summer 2019 - Margherita Isola
Tangent Projects is delighted to announce that our first Cotangent Awarded Summer Residency has been awarded to Margherita Isola.
Margherita's practice crosses many different mediums including textiles, sculpture, installation and performance. During her time at Tangent Projects she furthered her investigation into medicinal plants/ancestry /resistance while experimenting with other aesthetics and artistic formats. These discussions run through her practice and have culminated in a few long term projects, such as Guerrilha Verde and Revolutionary Herbarium.
Guerrilha Verde is a project regarding medicinal plants, ancestral knowledge and practices, and political-economic implications related to them. The project aims to reactivate knowledge and practices regarding medicinal plants, looking at the ancestrality, as a political stance and re-signifying planting and cultivation as resistance practice.
Revolutionary Herbarium is a book about medicinal plants that, due to their therapeutic principles, have been deliberately forgotten or removed from circulation to defend the interests of pharmaceutical companies. Ancestral plants, extremely contemporary in relation to diseases, that can prevent and cure. The herbarium is embroidery on fabric, Margherita sews the plants' seedlings. The hand-made infuses an anti-modern force with explicit references to the ancient codes and the sacred textile art of indigenous peoples - such as the Shipibo who work with weaving and medicinal plants. The Herbarium is conceived as a work in progress, to be enriched with new pages and new plants from different natural contexts; Mata Atlantica- Brasil, Salento-Italy, SintraPortugal and now, in Barcelona.
The selection committee for the Cotangent Awarded Summer Residency 2019 was Laura Olea López, Marina Rubio and Tsering Frykman-Glen.