"Mirage" is a site-specific installation by Agostino Iacurci. The artwork is made of 12 to 40 palm trees (number and dimensions can vary depending on the space available), possibly enclosed in a terrarium-like architecture. The palm trees and the greenhouse are made with colored neon tubes or flex led tubes mounted on a metal structure. This installation displays palm trees, which are among the most resilient and long-lived forms of plants on Earth. Palm fossils had revealed their presence on the planet already during the Cretaceous when dinosaurs were populating the landscape. They indeed have physiological and morphological characteristics that made them suited to a range of different climates and conditions (they become stronger after a storm; blend under intense wind pressure and resist drought).
The installation is semantically open to a range of different narratives: it can be a homage to palm trees, their diffusion, and ancestry, celebrating their solid presence as much in the West as in the East of the world, in the global south and nowadays even in snowy arctic environments, emphasizing their migration capacities as a species with no barriers and borders. The artwork also opens to a more critical and political interpretation addressing the ecological catastrophe caused by human abuse of fossil fuels, a by-product of plant’s photosynthesis accumulated in the Earth's geology for over millions of years.