The MACK x Scuola Piccola Zattere Reading Room will host an artist talk with Kwan Queenie Li to celebrate the publication of Weeds: A Germinating Theory, published by MACK as part of the new Sightlines series.
The artist will be in conversation with curator Lisa Andreani to discuss this visual essay, which brings together images and text to propose a new way of looking at the contemporary city.

WEEDS: A GERMINATING THEORY
For over a decade, Kwan Queenie Li has been photographing weeds in cities around the world, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Athens, Cairo to Mexico City. Her research focuses on these unintended yet ubiquitous inhabitants of the urban landscape, observing them in corners and cracks, among ruins and construction sites, in spaces suspended between uses and transformations.
Combining image and text, Weeds: A Germinating Theory proposes a new way of seeing the city from the weed's point of view, dissolving familiar categories and temporalities to imagine urban space as something constantly evolving and open to new possibilities. Weeds organically challenge what is often assumed to be fixed—walls, borders, history, and prescribed identities—becoming records of the lived reality of cities, marked by neglect and abandonment as much as by freedom and permeability. Out of place by definition, they offer a fresh perspective on the very idea of place, and on the ways it shapes, and is shaped by, its inhabitants.