Giungla is a festival of contemporary art and an opportunity to meet and discuss the complex link between man, nature and technology.

When did man come out of nature to look at it from afar? What does technology tell us about us and our nature? Who is subject and who is object, who acts and who undergoes the changes of what surrounds us?

Jungle in Sanskrit means “desert”. It is a place populated by plants and animals but inhospitable to man. Yet even in the Amazon rainforest there are traces of cultivated areas for centuries. Curiosity and reason – that everything must be in order to feel safe – led us to study nature by keeping it at a distance, making it a landscape to admire or a sublime calamity to fear; pushing it away, we have forgotten that we are part of it. But a rapprochement is possible, and it is perhaps the Botanical Garden in which this reunion can take place: a small museum of Nature in the city, a protected oasis where we can return to weave bonds of continuity between our existence and that of plants and animals. It is in this relationship, in the wake of this desire for understanding and rational order, for the development of thought, that technology fits.

Starting from the Renaissance – with the pictorial perspective we have sought a new way of seeing the world: measuring it in three dimensions, enclosing it in a fresco, in a canvas, as if they were windows. Today many windows exist, windows that we open and close as we please. And what happens when these objects – windows – observe us, emulate us and predict our thoughts and behavior? On the one hand, we, who are part of this nature that we keep away, on the other, the technology that was born from us and from nature. How to think of such a dense and connected world of relationships? How to live it?

Giungla is certainly not a place to find answers, but rather a space that over time – together with artists, philosophers and scientists – can collect questions and thoughts about the present and our progress in time.

Welcome to the Jungle!