How do you turn a white-walled gallery space into an underground enclave? By hanging roots from the ceiling, if you’re Sicilian artist Giuseppe Licari. Licari’s Humus (not to be confused with hummus) refers to a life-sustaining layer of soil made up of decomposed organic matter.
Here’s Licari on the nature of his work:
The aim is to provide the public with a unique feeling, which is related to a specific location and an exact moment in time, forming a collective memory between all participants. In this way, the possibility of loosing the aura has been excluded – the aura ‘is’ when the art ‘is’, and the art exists only at that time when the aura is simultaneously present. So through my work I try to represent a precarious situation of the world in a way that the piece exists only in the context in which was generated and it can’t exist out of it. The reproduction of an artwork would require similar conditions but a different configuration, which finally would become a different piece.
