Ecological ways of seeing, feeling and imagining. From the Garden and Agricola Cornelia of Gianfranco Baruchello to Beatrix

In the first part of my talk I will discuss how Baruchello has understood the idea of seeding and gathering in his work, from the years of the long activity Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., onwards; several points of view were intertwined and this constitutes a premise. Art, agriculture, politics, environment and personal research met in this long project. In the second part, I will focus on the relationship between art history and ecology, to identify the implications that, by bringing the two areas into interaction, can produce a conceptual transformation of the ways of seeing but, above all, of making art history. I will present a recent project born as a common and shared experience between an artist, Baruchello, and an art historian, myself. The project is called Beatrix and is in progress. Art has looked at and analyzed the landscape, but art and ecology can, on the other hand, produce a radical laboratory, within which art history is urged to interrogate its premises and its linear construction, profoundly shaped by canons and stereotypes, mostly linked to Western culture, which are now hardly sustainable. A process of cultural decolonization runs through art history and may be able to hypothesise different and more sustainable forms of making history.