Tania Candiani. Radix

What would happen if a museum allowed visitors to peer underground? What if, by pulling on a corner, a hidden, complex, and vibrant world emerged, normally relegated to invisibility? Radix suggests this possibility through an ecological fabulation that shifts the gaze toward the depths of history, culture, and the memories of the subsoil.

Tania Candiani’s project imagines a fictional biome inhabited by entities that oscillate between the scientific and the speculative, between the observable and the imagined. It is presented as an immersive installation conceived as a hybrid ecosystem, where living plants, blown-glass sculptures, suspended organisms, a root-tron (a device that allows observation of root growth), audiovisual projections in cross-dialogue, and an octophonic sound composition that envelops the space coexist. Each of these elements functions as a fragment of a larger, interdependent system, where the separation between the living and the inert is erased.

The exhibition space is architecturally transformed to adopt a smooth, radial geometry, inspired by the cross-section of a plant structure found in a book from the Botanical Garden of Valencia. This spatial configuration acts not merely as a container, but as a body in itself, an expanded anatomy that suggests the presence of an imagined plant, a possible life form that could belong—or have belonged—to the Valencian territory, but whose origin remains uncertain, suspended between botanical memory and science fiction.

In this sense, Radix does not seek to represent nature as we know it, but rather to speculate on its possible mutations, microworlds, and futures, inviting us to reconsider the boundaries between species, disciplines, and states of matter, as well as to reflect on the invisible forces that sustain life, fostering an awareness of the hidden networks both above and below ground.

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