Salad of Fossils

Images of nature and political ideas formulated by designers, thinkers, architects, and artists are tattooed on leaf fossils. For years, artist Luca Trevisani dedicated himself to printing nature-related political visions on dried leaves, but now this work takes on a new temporal dimension: imprinting these fantasies and squiggles on 320-million-year-old leaves is a desperate cry, a subtle and perverse seductive trap. These fragments become part of a contemporary wunderkammer, a collection that exposes our perceptual ignorance. Temporal distance acts as an inverted telescope, relativizing our preoccupations with the present and allowing us to understand ourselves outside the limits of our everyday context. Salad of Fossils is a publication born from the same idea of accumulation and material work, of having to rehash something in order to understand it, or perhaps to feel it with the mind and the senses. It is an atlas, a visual journey within a personal and arbitrary collection of works of art, events, situations, and gestures that relate to the fossil—not understood here as an object, but as the surprise that its encounter generates, as the break with conventions that it embodies.