Nomadic Garden
2023 - ongoing
Planter box with wheels and vegetables
Colle di Tora (Italy)
Courtesy by Casa del Direttore
Nomadic Garden is a itinerant project that began in Colle di Tora in 2023 and still on-going.
The work is a nomadic plant platform, moving around several cities, made up of allogeneic cultivations. Cultivating five plants of Chinese origin – coriander, chives, bok-choy, Sichuan chilli, and artemisia àicǎo – becomes a metaphor for the minority resistance, not only individual but communitarian: “the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own” (Butler 2004, 22). These plants, considered wild, require no care and are able to withstand very different temperatures and environments: Paolo Peng Shuai’s (eco)nomadism goes hand in hand with a capacity for adaptation and transformation that is paradigmatic of his identity and of that of an entire so-called “sino-italian” community. As such, dislocation, contamination, and hybridity become pragmatically creative processes, revealing a spontaneous coexistence with deep roots.
The seeds，plants and my body that compose germinates in a “nomadic archive”, which stands as a mode of action that invests the entire proceeding, indissolubly intertwining two inextricably conceptions of “dispositif”, which constitute the lenses through which to observe: time and object.
At the end of the performance, I invited the visitors to the terrace of the Casa del Direttore and prepared a cold noodles (湖南凉面), typical of the Hunan region, using plants that had grown the platform. In this third moment of the performance temporality is reactivated through my body, the objects, and flavor; the “dispositf” (Deleuze, 1989) is switched back on.