Benedetta Casagrande

All Things Laid Dormant, 2024–2025

In her project All Things Laid Dormant, Italian artist Benedetta Casagrande combines photography, text, and sculptural objects to explore themes of climate grief, love, and desire. Her black-and-white photographs feature fragments of nature and everyday life—leaves, beehives, shadows, and traces of animal and human bodies—captured with delicate attention to detail and an emphasis on transience.

The project also includes ceramic objects whose surfaces are coated with silver obtained from used photographic chemicals. Casagrande thus emphasizes the material dimension of photography and its ability to preserve traces of the body and time.

The central work of the project is the installation As I stay awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog, composed of twenty black-and-white photographs on baryta paper developed using plant-based developers. The author emphasizes the material aspect of the photographic medium and the search for more sustainable technologies, which at the same time reinforce the symbolic level of the entire work. The project thus utilizes a dialogue between the human and the non-human.

In the context of the Metamorphosis exhibition, Casagrande shows that transformation can also take place in the way photography transcends its usual boundaries and connects with text and matter. Her work emphasizes that even in situations of extinction and loss, we can find new ways of relating to nature and to each other.

Co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, FUTURES is a platform to increase the capacity, mobility and visibility of it's selected artists and to bridge the gap between emerging and established artists.

METAMORPHOSIS
October 4–12, 2025
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Venue · Holešovice Market, Hall 13
Bubenské nábř. 306, 170 00, Prague 7 Holešovice
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Opening Hours · 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.