About This Project

Fulvia Bernacca

Letting the grass grow is the story of a garden, of a place left hanging, of change, of love, waiting and resilience. It is the experience of difficult days, those when my mother was in hospital. While she was away, the grass in her garden grew, bloomed and withered. During her hospital stay, I photographed her garden, observed it with patience, fear and surprise. I looked for her among the blades of grass, in the scent of flowers, in the roughness of barks. I found her in what she had silently tended far from the everydayness of my eyes. Her garden, in waiting, was my cure. In a passage from And the garden created man, by the philosopher-gardener Jorn de Précy, a character invented by the curator/author Marco Martella, my feelings are voiced: ‘The gardener loves winter […] But winter is melancholic, and perhaps the gardener is wondering. My beautiful garden, will you still be there next spring? Will you really come back?’* “Letting the grass grow” has become a delicate portrait of the bond between my mother and her garden, and an open reflection on our role as human beings in a system older and more complex than our own. It is also an invitation to let go, to let flourish.

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