The analysis of reality produces reality, 2022
Engraved potatoes (from the land of Italy).

Polo del ‘900, Turin, Italy

Expo: Every food is a landscape
Curated by Marco Trulli

A network of engraved triangles gradually expands across the potato’s surface, starting from a single hexagon and spreading outward. Over time, as the incisions deepen and darken, the potato softens, and its outer form deforms and shifts. As it rots, each triangle stretches and distorts, yet the overall pattern persists, serving as a map of transformation that links the fresh state to its decomposed form.

Despite these deformations, the triangulation preserves a fundamental mathematical property: the Euler characteristic, a topological invariant that depends only on the number of vertices, edges, and faces. This means that, even as the surface warps and decays, the underlying combinatorial structure remains constant, revealing a form of continuity amid change.

In this way, natural decay mirrors the continuous transformations studied in topology, dissolving the boundaries between material and immaterial, nature and analysis, organic change and abstract structure. What remains is neither simply a vegetable nor merely a mathematical object, but a record of their entanglement, a half-natural, half-cultural object.