In the traditional herbarium, the plant is collected, pressed, dried, and classified. As it loses water, weight, and movement, the vegetal form gradually abandons its vitality to become a document, an archive of form. Libero originates from the same act of collecting, yet overturns its fundamental principle: here, the plant is not preserved in death, but encountered while still alive.

The book’s protagonists are weeds: spontaneous plants, often removed because they are considered useless, invasive, or out of place. Yet it is precisely these species that possess an extraordinary capacity for adaptation. They grow along roadsides, within cracks in concrete, in abandoned fields, and in neglected spaces. They are marginal vegetal forms, deprived of protection and ornamental value, yet capable of persistently occupying space and surviving where other plants could not.

Removed from the ground and placed upon white sheets of paper, they are photographed before time dissolves their presence. Their roots still retain traces of damp soil, stems slowly bend under their own weight, and leaves seem to continue orienting themselves toward the light. Nothing appears fixed or definitive: each image holds a fragile balance between permanence and disappearance.

Light thus becomes a central element of the work. It does not simply illuminate the subject, but reveals the very relationship between the plant and that which sustains its life. Each photograph records both the vegetal body and its shadow, as though light were imprinting two distinct presences: the plant’s materiality and the immaterial trace of its passage. The shadow accompanies each specimen like a silent and unstable extension.

The title Libero unfolds through multiple meanings. It is the surname of the woman portrayed resting among the pages of the book, a quiet human presence that introduces an intimate and contemplative dimension into the work. But Libero is also a condition: that of weeds, which grow outside the rules of cultivation, without order or belonging, in a form of spontaneous and undisciplined freedom.

 

Libero is a herbarium of presence: a place where weeds, removed from classification, remain for a moment within the light as bodies still traversed by life, affirming the fragile and persistent freedom of all that exists at the margins.