The first overview of the artistic research of Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna, an Italian artistic duo focused on site specific art project with a sensible attitude to the landscape, in a full-bodied monograph that interweaves interpretive and documentary approaches, critical and theoretical reading with the regest and reconstruction of a broad itinerary, through fact sheets and a rich apparatus of images.
Forerunners of art practices ecologically engaged with environmental issues, Caretto/Spagna identify art as the field of a radical experience of openness, undisciplined research and engagement with the "things" of the world: the earth, seeds, people, stones, the museum, the river, the quarry, the tree, microorganisms. Bright Ecologies. Caretto/Spain: Experiences, Forms, Materials traces and documents their 20 years of work, oriented by lines of research centered on care, transformation of matter and experiments on form, concretized in works, site-specific installations, workshops and residencies, actions and collective projects founded on encounter, process, gift, experiences of participation and co-authorship. Caretto/Spagna's artistic practice, shared since 2002, is marked by a philosophical, poetic and highly political matrix that expresses itself in the forms of activism and reflection on issues that are today at the center of international theoretical and artistic debate, in parallel with the rise of posthumanist and ecocentric philosophies, new materialisms and the growing alarm over climate change.
This volume offers the first overview of Caretto/Spagna's work, in a full-bodied monograph that interweaves interpretive and documentary approaches, critical and theoretical reading with the regest and reconstruction of a broad itinerary, through fact sheets and a rich apparatus of images. The outcome of discussions among the artists, the curators, and the publisher, Bright Ecologies is a book-length book that provides the reader with multiple points of entry. Structured in three parts, it opens with an essay by anthropologist
Tim Ingold, with texts by the curators (Francesca Comisso, Cecilia Guida, Giorgina Bertolino) and a series of crossreadings (Riccardo Venturi, Giusi Diana, Alba L'Astorina, Marie-Anne Lanavère). The central section of the monograph is devoted to the archive, edited by Alessandra Pioselli in collaboration with Caretto/Spagna. Starting with key concepts, it is organized into ten sections: All Things That Are, Domestication, Dwelling, Soil as Experience, Matter in-formation, Abyssal Time, Water Mountains, Divinations, Dark Matters, and Museum as Ecosystem. The documentation of over 50 projects is followed by ten narratives, ten testimonies commissioned by the artists from people who directly participated in the different experiences. The conversation between Caretto/Spagna and Alice Benessia and the apparatuses, constitute the third section of the monograph.
Andrea Caretto (born 1970 in Turin) and Raffaella Spagna (born 1967 in Rivoli) have been working together since 2002. Their artistic activity stems from the desire to investigate multiple dimensions of reality through the exploration of the complex web of relationships from which things emerge, establishing and re-establishing a relationship with the "the other" in an exercise of attention and care. Caretto/Spagna's practice is based on an attitude of "presence" and experience in the world, in the attempt to reposition ourselves, as human beings, by moving away from the centre to listen to other subjects, living and non-living.
