Post—
naturalia
Collezione Maramotti, an important Italian collection and museum of post-war and contemporary art in Reggio Emilia, opened an exhibit by Krištof Kintera in March 2017. The imposing installation entitled Postnaturalia, which sprawls through the gallery space, deals with the intertwining of nature and technology.
The catalogue the museum put out, which was printed in Verona, is an attempt at a book equivalent. The catalogue for the exhibit consists of two publications in one hard cover in which the Postnaturalia installation is reproduced. The dominant colour in it is fluorescent green – a chemical parody of the symbol for nature. The first book, entitled Postnaturalia, Scriptum Cuprum Factum, has a copper-coloured cover and contains reproductions of the exhibited objects, into which various quotes and graphs often intervene. The continuous succession of pictures is broken up in several places by texts by Douglas Kahn and Miloš Vojtěchovský, concluding with an interview with Krištof by Marina Dacci. Everything is in both English and Italian in parallel. The second book, entitled Postnaturalia, Scriptum Herbarium is inserted in the cover “upside down” and this time its whole cover is fluorescent green. It is a “professional categorised” herbarium with two sub-groups: Floribus Futuris Praeteris and Floribus Elektronum. In it, Krištof’s inorganic plants are confronted with realistic drawings of plants from old herbaria, which come in part from the collections of the Municipal Museum in Reggio Emilia and were exhibited along with their didactic models in Laboratorium, and in part from the library of the Charles University Faculty of Science.