On the occasion of Artissima 2022, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Liquid Transfers, a solo exhibition by Diana Policarpo, winner of the illy Present Future 2021 Award, the twenty-second edition of the initiative promoted by illycaffè and Artissima. Policarpo's project is a new production created for the prize and is conceived as a new stage in a wider research path of the artist. This long-term research investigates the relationship between the plant world and the social, political and economic spheres, crossing scientific and speculative registers.

In the previous exhibition chapters, Policarpo explored the political implications and the medicinal and pharmacological use of Cordyceps, a fungus that grows in the larvae of the Thiratodes moth. The research represented the center of Death Grip project (2019), a multimedia installation created after research in India and Nepal and presented at the Museum of Art, Technology and Architecture (MAAT) in Lisbon. In 2020 the artist conducted research on the Iberian Peninsula starting from Claviceps purpurea, a hybrid parasite of rye better known as ergot. The field study process was formalized in the solo exhibition Nets of Hyphae (2020) presented at the Municipal Gallery in Porto (PT) and at the Kunsthalle Trondheim (NO). Through this work, Policarpo has deepened the intersections between the ancestral knowledge of traditional medicine, ethnobotany, the health of people with uterus, restorative justice, in the light of the development of the patriarchal system. The ergot has in fact been for decades a biopolitical device re-appropriated by marginalized subjectivities, as evidenced by its use by healers and midwives to practice abortions as well as to carry out pre and postpartum treatments.