In HERBARIUM, i fiori sono rimasti rosa (the flowers have remained pink) Alessandra Calò has put together three different photographs: those of the hands, the plants and the writings.
The hands are those of some frail people with whom Calò carried out a workshop that lasted four months, with a darkroom set up at the Palazzo dei Musei, for a collaborative project called 'Incontri! Art and people' which develops from the project of Reggio City without Barriers 'B. Right to beauty', an integral part of the mandate program of the Culture Department of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia.
The vegetables, collected in the first phase of the laboratory, are not noble and well-groomed plants, but those that are commonly defined as "weeds", referring to the concept of fragility/diversity understood as "that which does not fall within the canons" and with the aim to discover the beauty of little things.
Photographic herbaria were then created using ancient contact printing techniques from the 1800s, such as callotype, which do not favor precision, high resolution, but on the contrary, determine a creative process made up of trial and error which is more “human” and inclusive.
Finally, the third level, that of calligraphy, is taken from an herbarium by Antonio Cremona Casoli from 1883-845, preserved in the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, which does not have a strictly scientific approach, but more "sentimental". With this last operation Calò manages to reinterpret and enhance a part of an archive, relating the contemporary with the past.
HERBARIUM is for Alessandra Calò an inspiration to reflect on new ways of conceiving the image: in the representation of the gesture of care evoked by the protagonists, the imagined action becomes iconic and, thanks to the superimposition of the images, s It triggers a symbiosis between humanity and nature depicted.

The book is designed as a folder with images on 16 individual plates. Each folder has a photograph on the cover in which there is only the vegetable element: the choice fell on the fern, a highly resistant plant. Each of these photographs is printed by the artist, so each folder is different from the other, symbolizing biodiversity and neurodiversity.