Anna Dian notices what most of us do not see. To encounter spontaneous greenery, in fact, you don’t need a forest: just lower your gaze a few centimeters while walking on a sidewalk. We see them there, the “weeds.”
They are the plants that disrupt the entrance to our homes, climb the walls of historic buildings, and sprout from manholes. They disturb most of us, and we feel the urge to get rid of them with a gesture as trivial as it is violent. Yet they are ancient, resilient presences, capable of adapting.
The artist transforms San Costanzo into a widespread herbarium and installs botanical labels next to the plants scattered along the streets, which, like comic strips IRL, make visible what grows on the margins: capers clinging to walls, pellitories, spontaneous herbs that reinvent the way of inhabiting asphalt. In linguistics, to name means to define a concept or an identity. In literature, authors like Ursula K. Le Guin associate naming with knowledge and responsibility: what we name according to our will demands our respect. The artist affirms their existence; and care begins here. The project Know Me invites the public to (re)know and (re)connect with these urban plants, often ignored but extraordinary artists of survival, once precious medicinal plants, bearers of fortune, tasty sources of nourishment. An opportunity to see them, learn from them, and build a new bond with the nature that lives alongside us.
The work is part of ResidenzaLAB, an independent working group that is both a research and editorial laboratory. Here, people and plants meet to reflect on the question: “How can we learn from the plant society?”
Text: Margherita Animelli
Conoscimi (Know Me)
Anna Dian (@_anna_dian_)
Site-specific installation, stones, A4 signs, spontaneous plants, drawing, poetry.
The intervention was removed after installation: unfortunately, being on walls and public ground, we could not expect it to remain for long. You can visit the shop window of Ivana Cercolani’s grocery store, at Corso Matteotti 49 in San Costanzo, where a drawing and a poem by Anna Dian are displayed.
Visible from 09/25/2025 to 09/16/2026, supervision: Francesca Perlini
