Carsten Höller and Stefano Mancuso’s The Florence Experiment opens to the public on April 19.
The monumental installation/exhibition touches upon two seemingly different, but continuously interacting worlds: art and science. Höller leads the art side with his monumental slides installed in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, the latest in the artist’s series of similar projects. Mancuso covers the science, introducing plants into the mix, which are sent down the slide with the rider before being handed over to a laboratory in the Strozzina, where scientists “will measure their photosynthetic parameters and volatile molecules, as triggered by the emotions experienced in the descending visitor and picked by the plant,” effectively analysing the impact of human emotion on plant growth.
Ph. Samantha Vaughn
“With this project,” Director General of the Palazzo Strozzi, Arturo Galansino, explains, “Palazzo Strozzi will become a site of real contemporary experimentation and reflection, turning an architectural Renaissance masterpiece into a workshop of dialogue between art and science.”
Open until August 26, The Florence Experiment also includes two cinema rooms, one of which visitors will head to after handing in their plants to the scientists. While one room shows clips from renowned horror films, the other projects famous comedy films. The fear or amusement elicited by the viewer will produce different volatile chemical compounds, which will travel through a system of pipes to the façade of the building, where they will affect the growth of wisteria plants climbing the front. By summer’s end the façade should be a veritable hanging garden.
