We will leave the weeds by Chiara Bertin

In "We will leave the weeds", Bertin creates a layered auditory and mnemonic environment, intertwining the labor, ingenuity, and voices of women across history. The installation features five Mondine songs - political ballads from 1920s Italy - “Senti le rane che cantano” and Bella Ciao (Mondine version), delivered through headphones and accompanied by texts in Italian and English. The songs, once sung by rice-field workers, become instruments of historical resonance, linking the listener to lived experiences of labor, resilience, and resistance. Titles include Eight Hours, Italy is Ill, Let Us Go, Set Us Free, Farewell, Dear Farmhouses, and Oh, Train Driver, Shovel the Coal. The accompanying texts are rendered in cyanotype, a photographic printing technique Bertin has explored for many years. Cyanotype is renowned for producing deep cyan-blue prints. Introduced in the mid-19th century by the English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel, but it gained popularity for scientific illustration thanks to Anna Atkins, an English botanist and photographer who has long been overlooked by history. In Bertin’s work, cyanotype takes on multiple expressions: it serves as traces in her performances, as a medium for botanical illustrations of seeds on paper, and as large-format fabrics exposed to the sun for months. In We will leave the weeds, the cyanotypes themselves become the  support for the song's translation

Chiara Bertin (b. Milan, Italy) is a visual artist and researcher whose practice intertwines history, memory, and feminist methodologies. She explores forgotten narratives of women: botanists, scientists, visionaries, and laborers through reenactment, archival research, and experimental techniques. Bertin’s work creates relational and mnemonic spaces that connect past and present, emphasizing resonance (“risonanza”) as a method of mutual recognition, shared knowledge, and collective memory. She holds a Master’s degree in Arts in Public Spheres from Haute école d’art du Valais (CH) and a Master’s degree in Graphic Design from Libera Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. She is currently based in Fribourg, Switzerland, where she works as a Visual Arts Lecturer at HEIA-FR and serves as Artistic Coordinator for the Conférence des villes en matière culturelle (CVC). Her work has been recognized with awards including the Atelier artistique à Gênes attribuée par Fribourg (2022) and the Prix d’excellence artistique of the Valais School of Art (2018), and she regularly leads workshops in cyanotype, anthotype, and other experimental photographic techniques.

This artwork was part of EYES WIDE SHUT exhibition in August/September 2025 as part of Kunsttage Basel. 

To navigate the present moment is to move through a dense, shifting labyrinth, one in which historical amnesia, systemic obfuscation, and collective inertia coexist with urgency, resistance, and revelation. EYES WIDE SHUT brings together seven artists from Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and France whose practices dissect the layers of this contemporary maze, revealing the dissonance between perception and reality.
The exhibition title evokes a paradox: the simultaneous act of seeing and refusing to acknowledge, of knowing and yet choosing to look away.