Giovanni Aloi’s work as an art historian, curator and editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture offers a compelling lens through which we can reassess how flora and fauna are represented in art, revealing shifting societal attitudes towards the more-than-human world and advocating for a deeper ethical entanglement with nature beyond anthropocentric views; grounded in posthumanist and critical plant studies, Aloi critiques the legacy of objectification in natural history representation, highlighting how taxidermy, dioramas, and classical botanical aesthetics once served to domesticate or monumentalise nature’s difference, whereas today’s artists increasingly embrace the subtlety of moss, fungi, bacteria and vegetal intelligence, shifting the focus toward sentience, interdependence and vulnerability; in conversation with Urška Škerl, Aloi expresses ambivalence about the rise of Anthropocene discourse in the arts, where performative virtue and white-saviour dynamics often displace genuine attention to plants and animals, noting that while climate urgency fuels new artistic strategies, these are sometimes too human-centred to address ecological degradation with integrity; Aloi proposes a “cosmopolitan garden” as an alternative to the rigid native/non-native binary, advocating for species combinations that prioritise pollinator support, resilience and climate adaptation over aesthetic purity, echoing Michael Pollan’s ecological pragmatism and aligning with contemporary designers like Paolo Pejrone and Luciano Giubbilei, whose work balances local identity with environmental sensitivity; through his own books, notably Why Look at Plants?, Aloi applies Foucault’s notion of epistemic spatialisation to explore how spaces like the home, garden or greenhouse shape our perceptual frameworks and entangle architecture with vegetal life; his vision is neither nostalgic nor utopian but speculative and grounded, calling for ethical imagination, cultural diversity, and artistic inquiry that centre materiality, empathy and situated knowledge in the face of an accelerating climate crisis. Aloi, G. and Škerl, U. (2026) Art Rethinking Nature: Giovanni Aloi, Landezine. Available at: https://www.landezine.com
