Veleno Veneto by Enzo e Barbara

curated by ife collective
Foyer Ex Cinema Corso, Vicenza
20–28 September 2025

Part of Verso il Corso. Culture del Contemporaneo promoted by Fondazione Roi and Meeting Gardens Festival. Scrabula by Bucce Studio, with the patronage and support of the City of Vicenza and the support of Fondazione Roi and Fondazione Monte di Pietà

Originally, poisons were love potions, administered and mixed mainly from plants, capable of influencing human inclinations, affections and actions, but not only that. Over time, the ancient meaning of the term gave way to a tendency to highlight its negative effects. Poisons represent a universe of living and compromising substances, which act in various ways and on different time scales with the organism with which they come into contact and with which they interact.

Under the influence of human activity, plants mutate until they become poisonous. Beneath our feet, in the soil on which our cities and hyper-productive worlds rest, roots continue to absorb the substances present in the underground system.

Today, anthropogenic poison is the beginning of a process of damage that bodies absorb, reject and rework. It is an act of love directed towards power and profit for a small circle of people, and an act of indifference towards environmental resources, human and non-human communities, and territories that have always been celebrated for the authenticity and fertility of their agricultural land and landscapes.
Today, Veneto is Poison.

Veleno Veneto by the artistic duo Enzo e Barbara creeps into the entrance of a former cinema in the city centre. It is a scene teeming with plant life that is anything but reassuring, an intrusive and overbearing garden that bears the marks, colours, mutations and effects of pollution, always on the borderline between the visible and the invisible. This invaded, destroyed and poisoned area, which has sprung up from the depths of the building, invites us to take part in research linked to the spillage of harmful substances (PFAS) into the aquifers by the Miteni chemical plant (VI), which blurs the boundaries between disciplines in an attempt to generate positions that start from the unveiling of how industrial production continues to damage ecosystems and lives.

Photo by Giulia Capraro.