muSa mattiuzzi
Abolition Garden
Abolition Garden is the latest iteration of muSa mattiuzzi’s research into fictional monuments and installations. Its narrative moves through nomadic, threatened, and symbolic gardens to design a monument for the future. Working with plants, soil, and ecosystems, the installation asks: How do plants archive histories? How do they fight in the political arena or play a crucial role in reinventing society? How can one listen to the inner languages of plants, the stories they tell, and to whom are they addressed? Invoking oral histories, Mattiuzzi restores the camellia flowers once displayed in the windows of Brazilian abolitionists to covertly signal their support for plantation fugitives. The narrative about freedom is another life.
The third chapter of Abolition Garden Monument was planted on the grounds of the Max Planck Institute in Florence in spring 2024 and will remain there until autumn 2026. In the context of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program 2025, Mattiuzzi presents the fourth chapter installation version using soil, plants, and various materials to compose an archive of the research carried out in the previous chapters (I, II, III).
The investigative action Dive in the Dark involves an activation of the installation and connects the powerful herbs and flowers of South America, the healers who orally transmit knowledge of both them and the soil, as well as the struggle for land, to the political agency of gardens within the urban fabric. By linking power and plants to histories of oppression and the dangers of ongoing extractivism, Mattiuzzi prepares and destabilizes the ground for the fourth chapter of Abolition Garden.
This project is an imaginative escape, a radical action, and a living archive of cataloged plants.
Text: muSa mattiuzzi
muSa michelle mattiuzzi is a performer, visual artist, writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. She works across a range of media and modalities – often with the body and voice – and deals with presence, physicality, and communication. Unspoken contracts, colonial violence, official archives, personal fictions, and plantation memories – these are just a few of the elements that find their way into her work. muSa: “How to perform an official archive is one way of talking about what I do, whether I am making a video, a performative text, a sound work or a performance. Translation is the method I use to prepare for an encounter; it is not just a process of reformulating a message from one language into another. Translation is a labor-intensive, context-dependent process, as well as a form of critical fabulation.”