The overarching theme of 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen) is ”Urban Interactions”. Chief curators for this year’s UABB are Architect and Director of MIT Senseable City Lab Carlo Ratti, CAE Academician Meng Jianmin and art critic Fabio Cavallucci. Under the theme of ”Urban Interactions”, there are two parallel sections, namely ”Eyes of the City” and ”Ascending City”, both exploring the evolving relationship between cities and new technology. The ”Eyes of the City” section features Carlo Ratti and Politecnico di Torino-SCUT as the curatorial team, while the ”Ascending City” section is to-be curated by Meng Jianmin and Fabio Cavallucci. The following Open Call is issued by the ”Eyes of the City” team.

Arancio latest video especially made for the Biennale in Shenzhen, takes as a starting point, a series of videos documenting the experiments that the neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso created originally to exemplify some of his theories. At the core of Mancuso’s research there are questions about the rationality of the Anthropocene with the aim of overturning the human bias toward brain-centered intelligence by crediting plants with decision making and intelligence, giving them overall a more pivotal position in our coexistence.

In his video Arancio reflects and expands on the magical mysterious quality of the technologically induced compressed temporality of Mancuso’s original time-lapse footages. Through Arancio’ s manipulation and by intertwining them with found footages, the artist proposes a new reading of the initial material, moving it away from its originally scientific purposes, in order to create a psychedelic abstract visual illustration to a fictional narrative based around a vision of a dystopian where urban plants’ dominated future.