The Green Paradox project was born during the Swit artist residency in Gothenburg in September 2025 and developed around the figure of Scheele Green, an 18th-century pigment of extraordinary brilliance but intrinsically toxic. Discovered by chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who studied and worked at the ancient pharmacy Apoteket Enhörningen (the “Unicorn Pharmacy”), this color becomes the fulcrum of a visual investigation that explores the paradox between aesthetic beauty and invisible danger.
The work is configured as a chromatic archaeology in which archival images and contemporary photographs intertwine to trace a subtle line between the history of science, myth, and the transformation of matter.
The essential counterpart of this research is the city of Gothenburg, voted “Europe’s greenest city”: an urban lung where nature expresses a living and regenerating breath, placing itself in dialectical antithesis to the mineral toxicity of the historic pigment. Through an act of photographic listening, the work deconstructs the legacy of a color that still questions our present. The result is a complex chorus where chemistry meets ecology and memory becomes image, transforming the history of a color into a poetic reflection on the fragility of the balance between humanity and the environment. Scheele’s Green thus becomes the lens through which to observe nature’s capacity to persist and change, between aesthetic appeal and contemporary awareness.
Born in Genoa, Alice Jankovic is a visual artist and photographer with a solid interdisciplinary background. After completing art school, her passion for photography was ignited during a year spent in Sweden, where her encounter with Nordic light became a profound inspiration for her visual research.
After returning to Italy, she broadened her academic perspective by attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (New Technologies for the Visual Arts) and, subsequently, the Academy of Genoa (Art Education). Desiring, however, to fully immerse herself in photography and specialize in a targeted manner, she interrupted her academic studies to move to Milan, where she completed a two-year intensive program at the Italian Institute of Photography (IIF). Her growing passion for publishing and photo editing led her to further explore the connection between image, text, and storytelling, attending the Photography and Literature course at the Jack London school in the Marche region and several specialized workshops in visual storytelling.
Her research focuses on the intersection of photography, installation, and editorial, evolving into a form of “visual archaeology” that integrates digital and analog photography and archival materials.
Influenced by myth and literature, the artist deconstructs the image to recontextualize it, transforming the photographic act into a tool for investigating memory. Through a constant dialogue between past and present, her works interrogate the human imprint on the landscape, hovering between documentation and evocation.
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