Leonardo Caffo™

Lecture series: “The Garden in Art, and Art as a Garden. A Contemporary Perspective” / The University of the Arts Helsinki, Uniarts Helsinki

Lecture-performance: “Egle Oddo & Leonardo Caffo : Evolutionary Gardens as a Practice, the Birch as Metaphor, or the Inverse Glaciation”
DAY 27.2. from 9:30 to 12:00 (time in Helsinki) one hour and half presentation + Q&A and interaction

Abstract
A lecture-performance at the intersection of philosophy and contemporary art. Centred on Egle Oddo’s practice with Evolutionary Gardens, the lecture focuses in detail on a site-specific project involving Etna’s birch populations (Betula pendula and Betula aetnensis), where Oddo and Caffo are presently collaborating.

Since few decades, Oddo have been dedicated to creating living sculptures by installing evolutionary gardens that function as public art works. By planting wild species and cultivars together, she fades the demarcation line between sites for agriculture, untamed soil, and urban green areas. These gardens become living seed banks, safety zones for biodiversity, allowing the most vulnerable species to thrive. Evolutionary gardens are installed with the aim to observe how they change, they are spaces intended for plant autonomy, giving origin to unusual biotic assemblages. 

This process took several years to form, and went through a long transformation where the typical aims of fine art production progressively were left behind, giving space to valorisation of immaterial heritage and protection of commons. With an integrative approach, Oddo created an interdisciplinary process called performative habitats, by making associations between specific cultural, economic, ecologic and philosophical aspects, therefore the necessity to collaborate with different practitioners and theorists.

The site-specific project involving Etna’s birch populations (Betula pendula and Betula aetnensis) was initiated by Oddo who immediately involved Caffo. These birches, which naturally migrated southward from northern Europe during the last glacial maximum and remained on the volcanic slopes of Sicily as relic communities, are now – under the pressure of rapid climate change – beginning to migrate northward once again. The project stages their conceptual and material “return” to the sub-Arctic and boreal latitudes from which their ancestors departed 20,000 years ago.

What does it mean, philosophically and artistically, for a Mediterranean birch to “go home” through the power of a concept, a translocation that is no longer biological but speculative? How can the current anthropogenic inversion of glacial dynamics – an “inverse glaciation” in which heat, rather than cold, drives species displacement – become a lens through which we re-interrogate our ontological bond with the planet?

At stake is a twofold realisation:
1. In the Anthropocene, the classical link between species and topos dissolves: every place tends to become climatologically identical to every other place. The genius loci evaporates when the planet’s atmospheres homogenise.
2. This accelerated climatic globalisation is not merely an ecological disaster; it is an ontological event that demands new speculative practices – philosophical, artistic, and hybrid.
The birch, with its white bark that reflects rather than absorbs light, its capacity to colonise both post-glacial moraines and post-eruptive lava fields, its stubborn endurance at the extremes of temperature, becomes the ideal speculative operator. It allows us to think the unthinkability of a world in which “here” and “there”, “native” and “alien”, “past” and “future” collapse into a single, burning present.

The project therefore proposes neither conservationist nostalgia nor techno-solutionist optimism, but a third path: an art-philosophy of deliberate anachronism and controlled ontological displacement. By philosophically and performatively accompanying the birch on its return journey, we practise a form of resistance that is at once aesthetic and metaphysical – a resistance to the flattening of the Earth into a single, undifferentiated hot spot.
In the end, the Etna birch does not simply migrate. It forces us to migrate with it – into a thinking that is no longer anthropocentric, no longer Eurocentric, no longer bound to the fiction of stable territories. A thinking, rather, that learns to inhabit the inverse glaciation as the new condition of possibility for planetary speculation.

Bios

Egle Oddo is an artist dedicated to long-term and context based projects. Her work focuses on linear and non-linear narration as an art form. Interested in operational realism, meant as the presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement and its inter-relations, she combines photography, moving image, installation, sculpture, environmental art, and experimental live art. In her pieces industrial production morphs towards delicate handcraft, life forms appear and emerge out of sculptures and objects, film photography appropriate digital images, selected trash mix with fashion, precious edible minerals and ancestral recipes are served as part of ritual meals. Her work is present at international biennials, museums and relevant institutions, as well as cutting edge and independent alternative spaces and events, to mention few: Manifesta12, Zilberman gallery, 3me Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, Finnish National Museum of Photography, 54th International Exhibition Venice Biennale, Triennial Agrikultura, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Kunsthalle Exnergasse Vienna, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Transmediale, Pace Digital gallery New York, Loop Barcelona. Her work is part of private and public collections, among them the Archive of MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art (Rome), and the collection of the Ministry of Italian Culture via Italian Council.
Her research is available to read in the following publications: Flash Art 68, 7-9/2023, Czech & Slovak Edition, cover and article; Performative Habitats, eds. Egle Oddo & Lori Adragna, Postmedia Books, Milano; Antennae, The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, #53 Vegetal Entanglements, ed. Giovanni Aloi, London; RUUKKU, #16 Working with the Vegetal, eds. Annette Arlander, Jerry Mättä, Malin Lobell; CrossSections, ed. Basak Senova, published by De Gruyter & Edition Angewandte, Vienna; SEI DECLINAZIONI DEL PAESAGGIO #2, with Paola Alborghetti, Stefano Cagol, Francesca Conchieri, Mauro Cossu, Eckehard Fuchs, Gruppo sinestetico, Egle Oddo, CSP Centro Studi sul Paesaggio, Biblioteca Queriniana, Brescia, IT.
She lives and works between Finland and Italy.

Leonardo Caffo (b. 1988, Catania, Italy) is a philosopher, writer, and curator whose incisive interventions fuse posthumanism, animal studies, and speculative ecology into urgent calls for planetary rethinking. A prolific author of over a dozen volumes—including  An Art for The Orher  (2015), Only for Them: A Manifesto for Animality (2015), and Contemporay Posthuman (2021)—he has shaped discourses on “weak antispeciesism” and the Anthropocene’s erasure of species-place ties.
As Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, Caffo directs the Parola journal, curates hybrid art-philosophy exhibitions at venues like La Triennale and Castello di Rivoli, and pens columns for Corriere della Sera, Internazionale, and Domus.