Project 15
Lucha Como un Brezo - Margherita Isola
Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen.
March 6th – June 5th 2020, Tangent Projects gallery. Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, Margherita’s exhibition was extended to June 5th.
"Lucha como un brezo" is a miscellany of works inspired by the power of plants, understanding "power" as a Spinozian assertion of "what a plant can do".
The exhibition opens up a range of possible scenarios on the power of plants - as a cure and embodiment of Pacha knowledge, as well as a poetical-political resistance device against the capitalisation of health.
Margherita was the Cotangent Awarded Artist in Residence in Tangent Projects in the summer 2019, most of the works in this exhibition are as a result of Margherita’s two month studio residency.
During that time, Margherita advanced her work-in-progress, "El Revolutionary Herbarium", an ever-expanding compendium which elucidates how forbidden medicinal plants are being made invisible and monopolised by pharmaceutical lobbies. Whilst at Tangent Projects studios, she enriched it with some of the medicinal plants that grow spontaneously in the urban context of Barcelona. Also as a result of the residency, there arose some post-vodou pelvis drawings colonised by feminine plants, and "Le Antenate" (The Ancestors) - a collaboration with the artist Heriz Bhody Anam - plant-skulls created by combining very contemporary expertise with vestiges of ancestral knowledge.
Brezo (heather) is a medicinal plant originally from Africa and Europe that grows spontaneously and which according to the World Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is a plant at risk of extinction.
Margherita Isola is an Italian artist who lives, and works, itinerantly. She graduated in History of Performing Arts and in Dance Pedagogy at R. I. D. C of Paris and she trained at Academia Isola Danza of the Venice Biennale. Since 2007 Margherita’s focus has been visual arts, mixing different media such as performance, textile art, printmaking, collage, installation and conceptual interventions.
She has exhibited at Charleroi Danse Biennal, Grace Exhibition Space New York, Troubles Space for Live Art – Brussels, International Biennial of Youth Art of Moscow, FAAP - São Paulo, Museum of Lace and Fashion in Brussels and the Choreographic Center of Rio de Janeiro, among others.
She is participated in the PEI-MACBA (Barcelona) programme, and is developing a new project in collaboration with the Goethe Institut to be presented in the second half of 2020 in São Paulo.