Lara Favaretto: I poveri sono matti (The Poor Are Mad)

25 may 2004 - 27 june 2004

“Changing eyes in order to learn how to be an amusement ride.” With these words Lara Favaretto describes the direction of her most recent research, a project in which sentiment, history, melancholy, and imagination become one. As the winner of the 2004 edition of the Fellowship for Young Italian Artists, last summer Favaretto embarked upon a journey that brought her to Rajasthan, India, following the traces of Gypsy culture. The idea of the journey was born from the desire to visit the place of origin of the Sinti Gypsies, who in the course of history migrated to Persia and then to Europe and Northern Africa. The last descendents of these nomadic people include present-day funfair showmen.

Conceived as a “sentimental research” rather than as scientific analysis, Favaretto’s journey is the logical consequence of her artistic vision in which issues about the spirit of the feast, including its primary expressions, such as the carnival, circus, and funfairs, are a source of inspiration.

Each time she starts a new project Favaretto wishes to offer her audience the excitement of a “suspended time,” separated from the predictability of the quotidian. The everyday is, conversely, made merry by the possibility of the “marvelous” as it contemplates the hypothesis of changing points of view in order to make the elation of an upside down world tangible.

From Italy to India and back to Italy again, and following the wanderings of the Gypsies, the artist considers the condition of amusement rides, each time installed and then de-installed from one square to the next, and sees them as living in organic unity with the people who own them. According to the artist, the human element and the machine therefore make a unique “spectacle” where “disappearing in order to exist” is necessary.

As the artist chooses not to work from the memories of her journey but rather tries to set up the conditions for a new hypothetical departure, this particular work by Favaretto consists in a trailer, the traditional home-on-wheels of funfair people, literally hanging by a thread. As true experience of her journey transformed into a shared fantasy, the work is named with an autobiographical title after the book by Italian writer Cesare Zavattini, I poveri sono matti (The Poor Are Mad ) (1937) a surreal story where the dream-intended as infinite, consoling, and open possibility-is the protagonist.

Marcella Beccaria