For La Biennale di Venezia, Jef Geys (b. 1934 Leopoldsburg, BE) presents an entirely new project entitled Quadra Medicinale. The project is an interdisciplinary research documented with plans, inventories, descriptions, photos and drawings.

As a point of departure, Jef Geys adopts the term ‘terroir’, a term that relates more to the notion of biotope than with the idea of territory. With regards to motifs and structures, Geys develops elements that have featured in his work since the last four decades and which are documented in the accompanying newspaper

Quadra Medicinale begins with a basic research the artist asked four acquaintances who live or work in a large city – Villeurbanne, New York, Moscow and Brussels – to carry out. Each of them delineated one square kilometre and, within that surface, searched for twelve wild plants that grow in the streets, in order to explore the basic components of their immediate surroundings.