BINTA DIAW: WHERE THE VINES INTERTWINE. RESISTANCES, ALLIANCES, LANDS

At PAV – Parco Arte Vivente in Turin, Binta Diaw presents Where the Vines Intertwine. Resistances, Alliances, Lands (open until March 8, 2026), a project that transforms the exhibition space into an organic, walkable environment. The display unfolds through suspended installations, expanses of soil, and woven structures that alter spatial perception, inviting visitors into an immersive and relational experience. The artist’s research focuses on the intersections of memory, environment, and politics, adopting a diasporic and decolonial perspective that challenges Eurocentric narrative frameworks. The use of materials such as earth and synthetic fibers, particularly artificial hair, generates textures reminiscent of climbing vegetal systems, suggesting connections between bodies, territories, and layered histories. The overall installation constructs a field of tensions in which resistance, care, and alliance become operative categories.

Born in Milan in 1995 to a Senegalese family, Diaw has developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Active internationally, she investigates migration, diasporic identities, and gender issues, articulating a body of work that combines autobiographical elements with broader historical and social analysis.

The dialogue with the spaces of PAV encourages an interweaving of perspectives that coalesce into a single, stratified scene. Visiting the exhibition at a moment when the landscape has not yet taken on the colors of spring, but already reveals the first signs of seasonal transition, intensifies this impression: the air retains a certain harshness, a suspended tension that anticipates regeneration. Walking through the galleries with shoes still marked by the park’s mud reinforces the continuity between exterior and interior. One senses movement within matter in fermentation, within a ground that is not merely a surface but a living substance in the process of recomposition. It is a state of fertile expectancy, as though beneath the surface new shoots and new connections were already taking form.

The exhibition moves from photographic portraits in which the artist’s body becomes landscape (Paysage Corporel IV.III), to a monumental installation that redraws the plan of a slave ship using soil elements, where fresh green sprouts emerge (Chorus of Soil). In the background, synthetic hair arranged like mangrove roots (Paysage Corporel XIV) rises from earth and water, linking different dimensions and evoking body, nature, and society within a framework of interdependence. These connective structures also appear in the outdoor installation in the courtyard, where they merge even more organically with the surrounding park environment.

Continuing into the project room, visitors encounter an intricate network of web-like structures that convey a form of fragile yet enduring resistance, recalling the strength of African women on slave plantations (Dïà s p o r a). A photographic sequence tracing the body in full metamorphosis leads to the video room, where the performance Essere corpo presents earth and body moving in a shared choreography, bringing human and natural realms into a single continuum.

The exhibition restores trauma, both historical and contemporary, to a relational dimension, releasing it from the fixity of the wound and reinscribing it within a horizon of generative interdependence. Rather than simplifying the present, the project engages its complexity, allowing the possibility of shared forms of transformation to emerge. The exhibition is realized with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT, Regione Piemonte, and the City of Turin. The project is part of New Perspectives for Action, within the platform Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.