Flavio Favelli (Florence, 1967) graduated in Oriental history at the University of Bologna, is one of the best-known living Italian artists, and is also a compulsive accumulator of disused furniture recovered from markets, of everyday or waste materials that he uses in his works, capable of mending past and future, art and life. In his production subjective and collective memory coexist, they relate to the public and the place in which they act. In Palermo Favelli presents a sui generis exhibition, in which the Sicilia magazine, the signs, the demountable – old barriers from the warehouses of the Bona-Ucciardone prison tell of its relationship with the city, enhancing the relationship between the Regional Museum and the prison management. Let’s find out more in this exclusive interview.
How did the exhibition “Sicily and other figures” conceived for Real Albergo delle Povere, Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palermo, curated by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone, come about?
Evelina De Castro, the director of the Rice Museum, invited me, I had done a seminar with people in external criminal execution. The exhibition is the result of a recovery and assembly of elements taken from different contexts.
How did you create the installation composed of 89 issues of the magazine? Sicily published by Flaccovio from 1953 to 1983 and what goal did you set yourself?
It is a magazine display, original complete series with a collage on the cover. Looking for formal and conceptual correspondences, I placed some advertising clippings taken from magazines. I believe that there is a dense relationship between advertising and the island, and therefore between the magazine that represents it. The island is isolated and images and television are the means to feel less isolated. When the national football team wants a warm audience, it plays in Palermo, the show, the event like the celebration ofthe sanctity. And is there a more explosive spectacle than advertising? Here the House of Freedoms (is there a more beautiful place in the world than the House of Freedoms?) won 61 to 0 in 2001.
What are the connections between this important magazine and Palermo in particular?
This magazine is part of one of the many incredible Italian excellences, a bold and experimental edition in content and graphics. Especially the graphics, sometimes disjointed and irreverent, with badly written titles to present monuments or local delights. Refined, with a sweetened image of the island, but also subversive, considering the classist culture of society, it put together high things with low things.
Signs, ‘rollovers’ and barriers, these are the central elements of the installation, why did you put them together?
They are products that come from the factory, from the modern age, from the fast society. They are strong, decisive signs, they are serial objects that go beyond the craftsmanship, work and society of the past. The demountable (iron bins for collecting building debris) in particular, are typical of Palermo, they are a constant presence. There is a relationship between these and the pastry shop, they are the two decided extremes present in the city, the outcast and the delicious, in no other city can you see this. The demountable it’s part of the military logistics and the rest, the whole landscape from Punta Raisi to the city, looks like a big compound.
Coinciding with the exhibition, you present another site-specific intervention in the green area of the Ucciardone prison, a habitable container reserved for meetings between inmates and their families, created on the occasion of the SPAZIO ACROBAZIE project: how did this collaboration come about and for what purpose?
It’s not easy for an artist to work on things that are useful. I wanted to do this long seminar in prison for various reasons. And there was a need to create a covered space in the garden for meetings with the families of the prisoners. I thought I could put a container, or rather two, open them in the walls and paint them with an abstract pattern.
What does SPAZIO ACROBAZIE do?
Built on three different targets (prisoners with definitive sentences in the Ucciardone prison; minors and prisoners in external penal execution), Spazio Acrobazie, curated by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone, aims to create an innovative model of “services” that works as a hinge between inside and outside, using art and creativity as an opportunity for training, redevelopment of detention spaces and as a productive formula capable of improving the image and positioning of what is produced by the prison system through the formula of the workshop with the artist. A redevelopment that moves from places to people, using art itself as a training model capable of promoting the acquisition of new relational skills. The project is promoted by Acrobazie and Ruber contemporanea.
You have been frequenting Palermo for years, what are the aspects of this city that fascinate you and those that irritate you?
My acquaintance is exclusively of a poetic nature, suitable for the surreal environment of the city which is the place of conjunction between heaven and hell, everything is mixed with stones, enamels, gold and carcasses together. Palermo is a sophisticated dream, it represents, with Naples and Rome, the human story of Serie A (in comparison the other cities are villages, residences), but it is smaller, more restricted; it seems that the island has its own scale, its own metric system that redesigns the measurements and these more cautious measurements make it a rarefied city. The Cathedral has no square, but a private garden, the Teatro Massimo no one would say is the largest in Italy, it is located in a semi-domestic clearing, the exquisite heart of the Quattro Canti is garnished with reinforced concrete checkpoint barriers, the highways are state highways with guardrails. It is a city marked by the power of the art of the past, which hits harder here.
What are the most mysterious places in Palermo for you, where would you perhaps live and why?
It seems that the rocks around her will bury her at any moment.
