ABOLITION GARDEN

Abolition Garden is an anti-monument, a memorial, and an artistic research project by Brazilian artist muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi. The recently planted installation in the garden of Palazzo Capponi-Incontri is born out of the artist’s desire to uncover resistance stories throughout the process of Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (legally or officially ended in 1888). She poetically translates found elements of resistance into a growing garden of herbs and flowers, all of which are central for the modes in the fight against slavery and in the larger diasporic context, yet still widely invisible in the official abolition narrative. Mattiuzzi’s garden is a performative gesture that considers the intangible elements of resistance while revealing the significance of popular performative epistemology in preserving culture and writing history.

Abolition Garden is temporarily placed in the garden of KHI's Palazzo Capponi-Incontri. The medicinal and flowering plants – among others mint, basil, or rue which are also commonly used in the Mediterranean region – are guarded by a repelling-looking metal structure. Together the highly symbolic metal object and the triangular-shaped arrangement point to the sinister history of slavery and the aftermath of abolition in Brazil, to the migration of plants and people between Africa, South America and Europe, as well as to the metabolic relationship between herbs and microorganisms. Mattiuzzi recognizes these plants as essential in today’s discourses about indigeneity while also valuing them as spiritual and healing objects in ancestral Afro-Brazilian practices. This is how the garden installation becomes a metaphorical seeding ground for performing resistance and a remedy for combating racism today.

The Abolition Garden will be accompanied by a series of events and conversations, considering ongoing research on historical gardens and monuments, indigenous healing practices and commemoration, ecology, decolonization initiatives in the archives, as well as debates in contemporary performance art, and Black radical thinking.

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The art installation is part of the institute’s ongoing engagement with artistic research and contemporary artists. In collaboration with the Villa Romana in Florence, the Kunsthistorisches Institut initiated a cross-media communication, in which invited artists come to Florence for several months to engage in conversations about their projects and those of the scholars of the institute. As Artist-in-Residence at Villa Romana in 2021, Mattiuzzi experimented with the design of a vegetal monument that reimagines the political scope of plants in the context of historic plantations, abolition symbols, and healing traditions in Brazil.

muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her research and artistic practice unfold in performances, writings, photography, and artistic films. Colonial violence and the body of the black woman are constant themes of the artist’s poetic inquiry. By exploring colonial wounds and anti-colonial expressions of Brazil and beyond, she appropriates and subverts the ‘exotic place’ assigned to Black bodies by white normative image narratives in her work. Mattiuzzi has performed and exhibited internationally, including the Biennale of São Paulo 2026 and 2018, the Documenta 14 – Capacete Residence Programme in Athens, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. For her film Experiencing the Flooding Red, she received the prize for the best short film at the X Janela Internacional de Cinema de Recife in 2017. She has been artist-in-residence at the Villa Romana in 2021. https://www.studiomusa.art/en/