980°

980° consists of three types of planting pots made from terracotta composed of a mixture of pigments and soils from cultivated areas of Orta di Atella (Caserta) located in the so-called terra dei fuochi, a vast area contaminated by the burial and burning of toxic waste in Campania. The formal aspect of 980° is marked by the artist’s reinterpretation of historical French barbotine ceramics with a naturalistic subject, and the relief textures are obtained from the one-to-one scale tracing of thistle, savoy cabbage, and corn. The vessels, whose shapes reproduce the features of these plants, were materially made from a mixture of potentially contaminated earth and then dried by firing them in earthenware kilns at a temperature of nine hundred and eighty degrees Celsius.