This is not a fairy tale

Abstract

This is not a fairy tale is a dialogue between Giovanni Aloi and Monica Gagliano that emerges from a shared experience of aesthetic and intellectual dissonance at a conference presentation on Pierre Huyghe’s Liminal exhibition (Punta della Dogana, Venice, 2024). Frustrated by the exhibition’s apocalyptic tone and predictable portrayal of more-than-human life, Aloi and Gagliano use this conversation to question the current frameworks of ecological art and its capacity—or failure—to tell urgent, transformative stories. Moving beyond critique, they explore speculative realism, trust, and the role of affect and imagination in both science and art. From the parasitic yet enigmatic dodder plant to metaphors of porous boundaries, their exchange navigates the fertile space between disciplinary languages, epistemologies, and lived experience. Trust, rather than hope, emerges as a central concept for rethinking ethics, aesthetics, and multispecies futures. Informed by posthumanism and critical plant studies, their conversation is not a critique for critique’s sake, but a generative reconsideration of how art and science might together sustain open-ended, situated, and transformative narratives for the ecological challenges of our time.