The concept of nature — and its entanglement with art — lies at the heart of ongoing theoretical discourse and creative inquiry across disciplines such as visual art, architecture, and design.
For several years, Vincenzo Castella has been engaged in a sustained exploration of nature in captivity, particularly as it manifests within the frameworks of the contemporary city — a context he navigates with striking conceptual clarity. Here, nature is not simply a backdrop or external reality, but a mediated construct — a perception inseparable from the cultural lenses through which it is imagined, represented, and codified.

Modern sensibility — shaped by 17th-century scientific rationalism and later by European Romanticism — operates through paradigms of separation and dualism: on one side, the human subject as observer; on the other, nature as object, external and othered.

Today, some of the most compelling philosophical and artistic practices are attempting to dismantle this binary logic. They seek to generate new forms of thought and imaginaries that refuse the subject/object divide — resisting modes of objectification that are historically embedded in systems of racialization and patriarchy, and that continue to structure both past and present.

Salvatore Lacagnina 2021