24/09/2026
False Natures at FAF - Food Art Fair, London.
For this iteration, the work begins with a photograph taken by Riccardo Rizzetto at a market stall in Venice, where “castraure” — the first shoots of the Purple Artichoke of Sant’Erasmo — appeared under an altered spelling, a linguistic shift used to distance the product from the name protected by the local consortium.
That small discrepancy became the starting point for a wider investigation into artichokes originating elsewhere but marketed through names and visual codes associated with Sant’Erasmo. By reproducing the language of a highly specific agricultural tradition, these products retain the appearance of authenticity while loosening its connection to place, cultivation and provenance.
The photograph also became the starting point for Eroded Ecologies, a research project developed by Rizzetto at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, using the Purple Artichoke of Sant’Erasmo as an entry point into the changing material and ecological conditions of the Venetian Lagoon.
In doing so, the work opens up broader questions around what authenticity means when it comes to food, particularly in contexts such as Italy, where foods tied to highly specific territories increasingly circulate as brands, becoming progressively detached from the ecological conditions that once made them distinct.
The artichoke becomes a way of reading the Venetian Lagoon as a territory in which geological histories continually resurface within its ecological present. Through successive processes of engineering, reclamation, regulation and environmental transformation, the lagoon has long been reshaped, while earlier material conditions continue to reappear within its soils, waters and forms of cultivation.
Untitled (False Natures), 2026
Oil on canvas
70 × 95 × 3.5 cm
FAF —-Food Art Fair
Ladbroke Hall, London
5–6 September 2026
Food Art Fair
