Within POST ELETTRONICA
a project curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

POST ELETTRONICA, curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini, is an installations and performing arts special project that includes original creations, concerts, performances and installations by international artists who have gone beyond the electronic and digital mechanism towards a gestural and contaminated use of the new technologies.

Parthenocarp by Dutch artist Ronald Van der Meijs is a large-scale musical art installation whose sound is affected by the growth of growing cucumber plants.
The work consists of three sound cabinets, each with its own steel string suspended over a small black wheel sunken into the top face. These cables are connected at one end to an electric drill and at the other to a metal cage housing a living cucumber plant; a mechanical teflon ‘finger’ against the string changes position depending on the length of the vegetables as they grow. Thus each cabinet, functioning something like a mechanical hurdy-gurdy, plays a tone that mutates slightly over the course of the exhibition, relative to the cucumbers’ growth.
The installation is representative of the transformation of the urban zone of Overstad in Alkmaar, Netherlands, which has shifted from a farming region to an industrial area to now a modern downtown center, a slow urban transformation process, Van der Meijs reflects, not only associated with changes in the built environment but also include the surrounded noise, the skepticism and opposition from residents and political opposition partiesî. Likewise, the combined sound of the Parthenocarp system transforms very slowly during the exhibition, and is subject to a variety of harmony and discord.

Born in 1966 in Tilburg, Ronald Van der Meijs lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied architectural design and graduated in 1993 at the Art Academy St. Joost / Avans Hogeschool in Breda. He constructs site-specific installations and sculptures that questions how people relate to their environment by technology, both high tech and with more earthy, rural construction methods.
Natural processes are part and subject of many of his works. He is interested in how nature and humans organizes itself: the consistency of growth and decay, processes of evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment.
Ronald van der Meijs had exhibitions in various museums, galleries, artistsí initiatives, art biennials and festivals in the Netherlands and abroad. He received art commissions of the Dutch Province of Drenthe, SKOR and Atelier Rijksbouwmeester / Dutch Ministry of housing. He also received two art grands from Fonds BKVB of the Dutch government.

The realization of Parthenocarp within Fabbrica Europa 2012 is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands