Photos & Concept: Elena Rivoltini & Paola Lesslhumer
2026
2026
Elena Rivoltini received the Premio Vienna 2025 – 2026, an international residency and performance art fellowship awarded by the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna (through the APL), the Italian Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Bears in the Park. It was through this fellowship that Elena, Paola, and Gertrude met in Vienna.
Elena began accompanying Gertrude—a woman with over forty years of foraging experience, who is sharing her knowledge with us through an exchange grounded in gift and reciprocity. The two spent long days foraging together in cemeteries, abandoned clinic parks and other liminal sites of the “Third Landscape”: spaces where herbicides are not used to maintain “normative grass” — shaped by aesthetic conventions and where edible plants are often treated as weeds and removed.
At the same time, Paola and Elena began a visual exchange. Paola’s analog and digital photographs capture Elena’s and Gertrude’s hands in this process of transmission: gathering, cutting, touching, comparing, exchanging — an archive of gestures, plants, and shared knowledge.
This exchange ultimately resulted in a collaborative zine that brings together old and new archival material. It was presented as part of a performance at Bears in the Park.
This exchange ultimately resulted in a collaborative zine that brings together old and new archival material. It was presented as part of a performance at Bears in the Park.
