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© Ron Benner
¿ Qué culpa tiene el tomate ? ( détail )
2009
Installation de matériaux mixtes et photographies
2 x 2 x 1,83 m |
RON BENNER
Ron Benner was born in 1949 in London, Ontario, where he lives and works today. He studied agricultural engineering before setting out on his artistic career in the 1970s. During those years he travelled extensively in Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and Asia. Along the way, he developed an artistic practice which joins photography, installation and horticulture. Plant life, which derives from nature and is in essence neither categorised nor compartmentalised, has become classified and even placed in a hierarchy in the name of science, itself in the service of international trade. By patenting plants, multinational companies have appropriated the right to market them or to make them disappear. In the latter case, we are deprived of a collective good as a result of an act of sterilisation. And yet all these plants, Benner tells us, are a resource that no one should be able to appropriate for themselves alone; rather, they are a collective resource which, by definition, belongs to everyone. At ORANGE, Benner presents the work
¿ Qué culpa tiene el tomate ? a living installation of 20 varieties of tomato plants, intermingled with photographs.