Chiara Camoni\u2019s exhibition I fiori del male<\/em> at Societ\u00e0 delle Api is accompanied by a Public Program articulated through three events, conceived to explore and expand upon the themes of the exhibition from different perspectives, bringing artistic practices, research, materiality and forms of collective imagination into dialogue.<\/p>\r\n The first event, Blooming Voices: Can You Speak Flowers?<\/em>, is a lecture by professor and curator Alexandra Midal. Since the emergence of floriography<\/em> as a codified language of flowers at the turn of the 20th century, flowers, bouquets, and ribbons have been deciphered as an elaborate code through which emotions can be expressed indirectly. Yet beyond a floral language of tenderness, friendship, and love, the association between femininity, flowers, and floral ornament also reveals what the British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere famously described in 1929 as \u201cwomanliness as masquerade.\u201d<\/p>\r\n The association between women and flowers, and more specifically the woman-flower analogy, which reworks the figure of the femme cafeti\u00e8re<\/em>, has given rise to forms of camouflage and playful mise-en-sc\u00e8ne as if suggesting that flowers could indeed speak.<\/p>\r\n From this perspective, Alexandra Midal will propose the hypothesis that women artists have often appropriated, played with, and distorted the supposedly neutralized vocabulary of female floral symbolism in order to conceal forms of secret communication behind visual simulacra. Through a series of case studies \u2013 including the herbarium of Rosa Luxemburg (1871\u20131919), Lo\u00efe Fuller (1862\u20131928) and her Lily<\/em> dance, and the work of Fadwa Hassoun \u2013 she will explore the ways in which flowers can become vehicles for coded, political, and emancipatory forms of speech.<\/p>\r\n Ultimately, drawing on Miley Cyrus\u2019s now-famous pop refrain, the lecture will explore the cultural and political significance of women \u201cbuying themselves flowers\u201d as an act of self-determination and of reclaiming a symbolic language traditionally associated with femininity.<\/p>\r\n Following the lecture, Circo Tornio<\/em>, the performative project by Chiara Camoni and her collaborators from Il Centro di Sperimentazione<\/em>, will be activated. The public will be invited to work simultaneously at the pottery wheel, in a collective process that transforms the practice of ceramics into a shared experience.<\/p>\r\n\r\n