From Friday 24 November, the month of contemporary art in Turin, the Reggia di Venaria enriches its already substantial permanent collection of contemporary art with a site-specific intervention created by the Turin artist Hilario Isola (1976) and attributable to the theme of sustainability , an element identity for the Consortium of Royal Savoy Residences.

The “Sinergie Esapodi” project starts with two first works installed in the Parco Alto and will be completed in the spring of 2024 with a third work which will be set in the Potager Royal at the Cascina Medici del Vascello.

The works, seen from afar, look like gigantic drawings, while up close they reveal themselves to be installations created by overlapping thin anti-hail nets , of the kind used in agriculture to protect fruit and vegetables from ice grains and possible parasites. Nets produced on an industrial scale, cut, overlapped and sewn together by Hilario Isola who, with this unusual and ingenious technique, creates the image of a landscape or an enlarged insect. Like the Queen Bee and the dragonfly (Palpares Libelluloides) which we find inserted among the lush vegetation of the historic gardens of the Palace and which become the symbol of a desired return to sustainable agricultural practices and which, more generally, express the need to rediscover biodiversity and good practices for the diversification of agricultural cultures, both to deal with ongoing climate change and to counteract the enormous growth of monocultures. Works, therefore, focused on the role played, in integrated biological control, by some insects, hexapods, which collaborate in synergy in the balance and maintenance of the agroecosystem, increasing its biodiversity. Hence the title of the entire project “Sinergie Esapodi”.