Alessandra Calò, Herbarium, i fiori sono rimasti rosa, 2022

HERBARIUM the flowers remained pink is an artist’s book by Alessandra Calò.
One of the distinctive features of Calò’s work is recognisable in the book, the superimposition of different levels that create a unitary, harmonious, symbolic image.
In this case, the artist has put together three different photographs: those of hands, vegetables and writing.
The hands are those of some people with fragility with whom Calò carried out a four-month workshop, with a dark room set up at the Palazzo dei Musei, for a collaborative project called ‘Incontri! Art and people’ that develops from the Reggio City without Barriers project ‘B. Right to Beauty’, an integral part of the mandate programme of the Cultural Department of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia.
The plants, collected in the first phase of the workshop, are not noble and well-kept plants, but what are commonly referred to as “weeds”, referring to the concept of fragility/diversity understood as “what does not fit into the canons” and with the aim of discovering the beauty of small things.
Photographic herbariums were then created using ancient contact printing techniques from the 19th century, such as callotype, which do not favour precision, high resolution, but on the contrary, determine a creative process made of trial and error that is more ‘human’ and inclusive.
Finally, the third level, that of calligraphy, is taken from a herbarium by Antonio Cremona Casoli from 1883-845,