Marco

I’m Marco Mocellin and I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about statues, trees, divinities and gardens.

Venetian by birth, transplanted to Tuscany, I studied in Florence and was struck by the Renaissance, in the most automotive sense of the word. But by scratching at its composed, geometric surface I found a surprisingly unruly world, and made a job of it: today, from morning to evening, I talk about art and about plenty of other things that seem to have nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, I had the terrible idea of working the land, curing myself forever of the illusion that nature is that green, well-behaved thing we like to imagine. In fact, the more I spend time with plants, the less I understand them. I consider that a modest success.

Without noticing, I brought the same chaos into my work. For more than ten years I have taken people through museums, churches, tombs and hills: you spend your life beside famous things and keep discovering that you had not really seen them. Since then I have looked with suspicion at cultural taxonomy: a work of art is not its label, a city its history, a garden its design. My work, perhaps, is to stay with these things long enough for something to begin to show itself.

In the end I find myself playing gardener to images: I gather seeds, prepare the ground, clear away what has dried out and pretend I enjoy waiting. GeniusLooci grows out of this rural stubbornness and from the suspicion that some things in the world resemble the deep roots of a tree. If you insist on digging them up in order to know them, you end up with a dead piece of wood in your hand. Perhaps it is better to keep imagining them: they still have so much to do under the earth.