Affine - Iper
On March 6th 2020 Margherita Isola’s exhibition Lucha Como un Brezo opened at Tangent Projects gallery. It had always been our intention to do an activation during the run of the exhibition - some kind of collaboration between artists and plants. However, while we were working on it, the Covid 19 virus took hold and one week after Margherita’s opening, Spain would go into full lockdown and the world would become a very different place.
During confinement, Margherita began to think of the city as a potential garden, a future guerrilla garden. She began to imagine filling all the small pockets of space and earth with medicinal plants, to create places where plants and people could converge for mutual care. Margherita then went about cultivating these medicinal healing plants on her terrace in order to be ready to go out and start planting the Guerrilla Drugstore when the lockdown was lifted.
The little garden around the tree in front of Tangent Projects gallery is a tiny part of this much larger project lead by Margherita Isola. When Margherita suggested planting Hypericum Perforatum in front of the gallery as an offering of resilience and healing to our community, it made sense to include the artist whose exhibition would be opening one year after Margherita’s. Aixopluc Suspès by Liliana Díaz opened on March 5th and Liliana’s observations of home, ritual, confinement and our need to connect not only to each other but with nature, are very in keeping with Margherita and Tangent Projects’ sentiments.
Margherita and Liliana planted the Iper garden on June 23rd 2021, using the soil from Liliana’s floor installation from her exhibition Aixopluc Suspès.