Céline Condorelli. Zanzibar

These artworks, and therefore this book,
contain the stories of plants that used to
inhabit exhibition interiors at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. Houseplants, like
most of the museum apparatus of visibility,
do not appear in the history of art and
yet have shared spaces with artworks
throughout the history of exhibitions. The
artworks are also cumulative studies of
a restaurant and concert venue named
Zanzibar, in Salvador de Bahia on the coast
of Brazil, designed by Lina Bo Bardi around
an existing mango tree.
Throughout her life, Lina Bo Bardi developed
an immense admiration for popular culture
and proposed cultural space as a social and
collective construction. All four works that
developed from this research have as their
explicit function to make things public — not
least art and space. They are simultaneously
sculptures and public spaces, artworks
that can be inhabited, sat upon, rested on,
allowing an intimacy with form that’s not
normally allowed with cultural objects.
The book is organised according to plant
species. Where these species appear in
common with the planting of Condorelli’s
structures the two bleed into each other.
This artist's book follows four artworks by
Céline Condorelli, that propose the garden
as exhibition, culminating with Zanzibar, a
permanent public artwork for King’s Cross,
London.