Les Doigts En Fleur ingenerates a powerful temptation to operate a semantic hacking of the concept of res extensa — the physical realm in the expression of René Descartes — to apply it to the concept of nature summoned and put in reaction with visitors by the work of artist Marina Cavadini. An extended system, aiming to redraw the accepted boundaries of both artificial and natural, using on this purpose the most iconic space representing the so-called artificial nature: a botanic garden.

Les Doigts En Fleur is part of the HotHouse series curated by Giovanna Repetto: a project articulated in several episodes, each one investigating those boundaries apparently separating nature from artifact, proposing to the visitors of botanical gardens, in different cities, “…a critical vision of the contemporary notion of landscape, as a result of the relationship between human and nature, of the contemporary threats to the environment we live in. (…) The typology of the botanical garden is the object of such attention, as it preserves and represents the highest expression of artificial dimension, in its pursuit of imitation of reality. (…) Landscapes artificially created from scratch, proper ecosystems kept alive by machines, gardeners and botanists, they could quickly become the set for an archaeology of landscapes.”

In her interpretation of the historical spaces of Orto Botanico in Turin, Marina Cavadini has kept following her reflection as an interdisciplinary artist, creating a physical, visual, contaminative  interaction with the whole nature contributing to the life of the Orto. This nature integrates architecture, as an element which may result even less artificial than the content and the concept itself of, for instance, a tropical greenhouse. The Garden, the old and new Greenhouses become therefore the setting of a performance and a  video installation available for the entire duration of the show: “…In ‘Les Doigts En Fleur’ — literally, 'Blooming Fingers’ — the fingers bloom, blur, and become thorns, become leaves, through a collection of accessories made from latex, lycra, tulle, and silicon. A tableu vivant thus activates the interaction between the flora and architecture of the Turin Botanical Garden.” A general re-questioning of the limits of nature ends up by involving all the newly integrated actors in a process of reactivation of an architectural space.