Foris - Agnese Galiotto

Foris (forest, outside), 2021

Fresco painting, 3 x 20 meters approx.

Städelschule Absolventenausstellung “The Whistle”

Shaumainkai building, Frankfurt (DE)

In 2020 I undertook research on the migration of animals and plants along the slopes of the Dolomite mountains.

Forests have always been places of move: the Latin word “Foris”, from which the name forest derives, indicates for many scholars a place of passage, a corridor between human and divine life. Today plants and animals move a lot, changing altitudes and ecosystems due to anthropogenic abandonment, environmental disturbances and the advancement of temperatures.

I started my study by placing a trail camera near the forest of Borca di Cadore, tracking the movements of the animals going up the mountain. From these images I created a fresco for the Städelschule’s Absolventen Ausstellung.

The fresco technique, as it was done in ancient times, physically joined the skin of the exhibition
space and the pigments became part of it. The result was an immersive installation, inside a place of passage of the building, thus as the corridor.

The deers that I photographed and met during the residency for months, wander at eye level, among oleander bushes and agave plants. A fox and two cats try to escape through a round window in the ceiling, and then plunge back into the greenery.

The plant species I painted are actually foreign to the Dolomites’ environment. Oleander, for example, grows in the warmer regions of southern Europe as do agaves, which grow in subtropical climates.

The usual realities and ecosystems are shown to be changed. The animals flee in a diagonal from the ceiling towards the floor, and the painting technique behaves contradictorily: the frescoes thus created last for centuries, but the exhibition spaces will soon be torn down. Like the flowers of the agave, the work was shown only once before its demise, and the animals depicted will die when the building will collapse. Will the ghosts still jump around, then?