La desinenza estinta
by Lucia Veronesi

From 21 June to 13 October 2024
Presentation Friday, 21 June 2024, 12.00 noon
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Curated by Paolo Mele and Claudio Zecchi

La desinenza estinta by artist Lucia Veronesi, is the winning project of the Italian Council (12th edition, 2023), a program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

It is estimated that in some areas of the world, North America, the Amazon Northwest and New Guinea, 30 percent of languages will be extinct by the end of the 21st century.
The indigenous peoples of these areas hand down their knowledge of the uses of medicinal plants only by word of mouth. Many plants and their pharmaceutical uses are known only in certain languages. If those languages become extinct, their knowledge also disappears and so do the plants. They will continue to exist on Earth but no one will be able to recognise, name and use them any longer. The medicinal knowledge of indigenous cultures is seriously threatened. It is a cancellation similar to that which has affected women, botanical scientists, whose names and scientific contributions have been removed or not recognized. Languages are to plants as the names of botanists are to the history of science: words swallowed by forests or uprooted from encyclopedias. A knot ties these erasures together, robbing us of the past and the future.

La desinenza estinta is a project by artist Lucia Veronesi curated and produced by Ramdom (Italy) made in collaboration with the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum MiST (Trondheim, Norway); with the support of the University of Zurich – Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany and Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies (Zurich, Switzerland); Goldsmiths University (London, UK); Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna (Museum of destination of the work) and Italian Cultural Institute, Oslo.
The project is made with the support of Collezione Luca Bombassei.
Catalogue Marsilio Arte