Ugo La Pietra
Erbario
Marinoni, Cassolnovo (PV) — 2021
ERBARIO (HERBARIUM) is an environment not only inhabited by plants. Each species with its particular shape, colour, whereabouts, and history, is associated with various non-plant elements: women and men, children, landscapes, music, things, water, houses, time, memories, letters of the alphabet, roast meat. In HERBARIUM, all these elements orbit the plants. We are free to follow any number of directions as we read and reread the book, and there is no need to worry about going around in circles. With the images and words that flow through our mind, every time we find a new vein, discover new pathways, some leading to plant names and place names, to certain faces, hairstyles, and nicknames, others to the environments in which a short tale is set, to food, peasant toil, falling in love, or to those who think, “it’s all fantasy”. On every page, the reader can associate a plant with a point on the map only to see it disappear along an imaginary line that connects countries, cities, regions, the mainland, promontories, and islands.
