Paula Valero, Resistant Herbarium Rosa Luxemburg (Mothers) at Vino Vero Venice

The contemporary art project “Vetrina” launched its second cycle of presentations in February 2024. After exploring the broad theme of nature through the site-specific works of the first nine invited artists, the focus has now shifted to the theme of activism. This new phase exclusively involves female artists, bold and provocative in different ways, who have always used their art to foster constructive reflections on the contemporary world.

For Vetrina#12, Vino Vero has invited artist Paula Valero Comín (Valencia, 1976), a multidisciplinary artist who promotes radical communication in shared spaces through her practice, generating poetic and political interferences in public contexts and daily life.

“Resistant Herbarium Rosa Luxemburg” is an artistic project that serves as the ideal continuation of the herbarium that the German activist created throughout her life.
The project aims to develop a genealogy that establishes a connection between the fundamental contributions of women and the preservation of urban plants in all their manifestations of biodiversity and resilience.

This is a multifaceted project that Paula Valero has been pursuing since 2020 in various countries, where she creates local herbariums with specialised collaborations, situating them within the knowledge of the area, starting from a study of plants and women’s historiographies.
The artist draws inspiration from Rosa Luxemburg, who compiled an herbarium that accompanied her even through the most challenging moments of her imprisonment, due to her opposition to World War I. The herbarium reflects Luxemburg’s profound attention to life, closely tied to her political mission: the care of living beings. She strongly opposed the war, rejecting the stance of her own party. Paula Valero’s herbarium highlights what Luxemburg saw as the most urgent political task: taking care of life.

The “Mothers” chapter of “Resistant Herbarium” focuses on women who have generated forms of care and protection of life.
This site-specific installation created for Vino Vero features women who have been “mothers” in various ways, showcasing the different meanings of “motherhood”.

A mother can be an author, a creator, or a founder of something. We will find women who have exercised a form of political motherhood, such as Rosa Luxemburg; women like Nora Cortiñas, who contributed to the feminist strike of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo; women who experienced other forms of motherhood, such as Hind al-Husseini, who founded an orphanage for children surviving the 1948 massacre in Palestine; women like Audre Lorde, who reclaimed motherhood in her first statement as a feminist writer and activist; women who cared for the wounds caused by war, such as Clorinda Menguzzato, a partisan nurse; women who legally protect others from patriarchal violence in Iran, such as the jailed Nobel laureate lawyer Narges Mohammadi; women who have been the matrix of transgressive initiatives for feminist emancipation in Italy, like Goliarda Sapienza; women like Silvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, who took on motherhood by providing emotional support through their Star House project, offering shelter to trans women in extreme precariousness. Finally, Mara Sartore, mother and creator of the VETRINA project, a multiplying woman, and Maria Pilar Comín, the artist’s mother.