Atlante palermitano di botanica migrante

Urban exploration and plants picking workshop, listing and printing using the cyanotype in order to create an herbarium of the migrant plants in Palermo.
Edited by Carmela Dacchille – “Edizioni Precarie”

An exploration and printing workshop planned to create an herbarium of plants picked in Palermo and coming from all over the world. A collective atlas of research, territory observation and examination, botanical boards that help us understand what we have under our eyes and we do not often see, that lives silently right beside us and who knows where is it from or how much it travelled through time and space so that it could bloom there.

Plants seen as a “migrant being”: through their seeds, through the wind, in bird’s bellies or under shoes sole, they are very well rooted to the soil and they need to move in order to survive and establish connections between them and the other elements; we will try to focus on the complexity and diversity that hide behind the seeming idea of simplicity of the urban nature.

We will be walking around picking plants, leaves, scattered seed, turning our eyes to the edge, to the small and insignificant, to what cannot be seen, to what only few can see in the ordinary life and urban crossing, to become an explorer able to understand the margin in which the urban nature lives, develops, exists and resists. We will train our eyes into new visions, giving importance to the right things, looking for wild plants and lost leaves. These plants will be listed and categorized in a botanic Atlas that will be printed through cyanotype, so that it will help in creating a precise map of plants in Palermo, a graphic constellation of botanic emblems.

Cyanotype is a simple photographic technique, made of steps and reactions, two oxides that on their own do not work are mixed and become sensitive to the light. Cyanotype is then structured in two phases: one is lighter, the other is darker, day and night, sun and moon.


martedì 4 luglio
10.30 — 13.30 / 15.00 — 18.00

mercoledì 5 luglio
10.00 — 13.30

info and registration
[email protected]