Art is for the few, whilst the city is for everyone. Flavio Favelli speaks

First name and surname: Flavio Favelli

Place and year of birth: Florence, 1967

Featured galleries and social media contacts: Studio Sales by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome

Francesca Minini, Milan, IG flaviofavelli, flaviofavelli.com

I live in the Emilian Apennines near Bologna, and for the past year and a half my typical day has been spent in my new home, Villa i Tigli, which I conceived and designed myself. It took me nearly five years; there used to be a lawn here. It’s on a sort of sloping plateau; it’s very quiet. My days fall into two categories: either I head straight to my studio, which is 15 minutes from Montepastore, in a village called Savigno, or I stay at home writing. I either work manually in the studio or write; there’s no room for anything else. I often look out of the window; I have lots of windows and French windows – but no ‘Living’-style glass walls – some look out onto my works on the lawn, one onto a fountain, then there’s a view of the valley, of the ‘Il Giorno’ sign, and then there’s a wheat field which is yellow in summer, brown in winter and green in spring. And there’s a terrace. I’ve only sat on the iron chairs – which used to be from my grandparents’ house in Pavana – a few times to look at the view from the terrace, because I feel a sort of embarrassment, perhaps a sense of awe, due to the ‘beauty’ of the setting. I mean, it’s too ‘intense’ to be on the terrace, sheltered by an irregular parapet and iron beams that lend a sense of rationalist order, framing a view of a gentle Italian landscape. I’m glad it’s there, but I avoid going there; I’ll go one day, when I’m less agitated. Or perhaps all this is just an excuse to keep my distance from Nature, from ‘beautiful’ landscapes, to avoid the ‘lovely views’ from the ‘beautiful homes’ designed by the elegant architects of prestigious houses. After all, having a ‘beautiful view’ has to do with domination. My day, however, is always in winter, whether in Bologna or in the Apennines, and my life is always in winter; it is truer, it is the true season of my life; spring is too exuberant and summer, foolishly, always passes too quickly. I could, after all, say that I spend my days thinking about what to say and what to do for art, and to say it and do it I had to go to Montepastore – I, of all people, who can’t stand mountains, flocks or priests. What exactly ‘what to say and what to do for art’ means, I’m not quite sure, but I do know that when I say and do something for art, I am not alone; I am speaking to all of you.

Since 2000, I’ve had a large warehouse in Savigno which serves as my studio. But sometimes I also work at home, in the sense that I create artworks there too. Yet the studio is a place that is more than just sacred – I’d say it’s holy – because an artist is someone who takes on everything that others do not, and to do this, they need a holy space. Put another way, it is a place that can be locked away, with no doorbell, where the floor can get dirty and be left dirty for months, even years, serving, shall we say, a redemptive purpose. It is the place set aside for creating the artwork, which takes place outside the constraints of everyday life; it happens – it must happen – beyond all logic.

Be wary of artists who discuss their work; they work in their studios or, worse still, refer to their artwork as ‘work’ to secure a Marxist blessing or to reassure people that they’re putting in the effort – ‘those who don’t work shall not eat!’ – and to satisfy the newspapers and TV channels that want to see the artist at work as if we were in the Soviet Union. The artist’s studio is a think tank that glorifies and praises an entire day spent hammering away at a tin box without having achieved a thing. The artist’s studio is a dream and, as Cinderella sang, dreams are wishes. A wish for which you have to pay the rent.

Retracing, revisiting, reworking, enlarging, emphasising, representing, redrawing and outlining the contours of objects – indeed, ‘things’ – which, as well as having been images and significant entities in my own history, are also part of my country’s history, and re-presenting them in a new, different form, means that they are crucial, they are great things, they are transitional in the opposite sense, that is to say, they are not fleeting things, but eternal ones; they are obelisks. They become powerful works; they are signposts – a sort of lesson that the artist sets out… when the prophet speaks, he points to things, he points to figures, he points to lines of reasoning; he gives voice to a thought, a point of view; and so I feel myself to be the bearer of a current of thought that is my own, and therefore I point out—I point out things that need to be rethought and revisited through my artistic devices, through new images, because I believe they are important not only for me, but also for the times in which I live. These new figures are, for example, inscriptions: neon signs, newspaper headlines, advertisements, road signs, film titles and book titles. They are words, they are imperative figures, which also convey other meanings; they go beyond their literal meanings, they are greater than that and generate images; it is time that speaks. I refine these elements, and convention dictates that they should be called art. In other times, they were called by other names.

I don’t think I have any visual or theoretical references, apart from those I have invented myself. I would say I am an ‘autarchic’ artist. Like one of the protagonists in my family’s history, I have sought – and continue to seek – to bring into focus, present and re-present those situations I have experienced, because they are models of a way of thinking that has shaped, and continues to shape, our times. Because I have lived through an experience that is representative not only of an era, but of a paradigm of existence within Western society. A sort of handbook of thought and imagery – more than a key, a master key.

The middle-class family, the Catholic faith, the golden mean, school, work, the golden wedding anniversary, prosperity, a love of beauty, culture, politics, sexuality, funerals, rights and duties. And all this in Italy, the Belpaese, between Florence and Bologna, two cities that are already global. So externalising all this becomes a major art project. Let’s say that I highlight visual issues which I transform into images, processes, objects and artworks. In this way, it becomes a relic not to be venerated (it is, after all, the market that makes it ‘holy’); it becomes a diamond with many (interpretative) facets. And a diamond is forever.

The fact that I was born in Florence to a mother from Bologna and a father from Pistoia – who then moved to Bologna when I was still a child – has exacerbated a historical and popular conflict, spanning customs, literature and art, which modernity has failed to extinguish. Damned Tuscans. And so I am an outcast, an exile, a refugee who has escaped two classic Italian identities: haughty, pompous, stale literary and cultural models. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I speak Bolognese or Florentine, with a mixture of shame and contempt: the local language disturbs me with its directness and shrewdness; the Emilian and Tuscan dialects strike a vulgar chord. The Tuscans, more than others, bear a tragic fate: they already know how it will end; everything is already decided. I’d say I’m a well-dressed refugee, raised amongst the Tuscan rabble and the Bolognese bourgeoisie, having fled to the Apennines. I’d say that above all else reigns, in absolute terms, a monad, a Moloch: the commodity. The desire for the commodity, the stuff, the product; the love of the product and faith in the market – pure monotheism. And then comes His Majesty Food: ‘What’s for dinner today?’. All this ‘presses in’; all this must be translated into works of art, into representations, simulacra, in an attempt to grapple with this infernal magma, this great blob. Aunt Tina, a woman from Pistoia, frugal and stern, used to say to me when I was a child: ‘A ship is coming, laden with…?’. Everything—loaded with everything. This is the age of the ship laden with everything; everything we want arrives and overwhelms us.

Creating a work in Gibellina Nuova is a very serious matter. Gibellina Nuova is a grand idea, but it hasn’t gone very well; the town is very empty, and a town is meant to be full. It’s also worth noting that Gibellina Vecchia is a sort of slab-like tomb created by the artist Alberto Burri, and so the new town was relocated and built on land belonging to another municipality. Such large-scale relocations are usually carried out by dictatorships; here, however – admittedly, those were different times, difficult to understand today – the vision was of a utopian city, a city inspired by art, but which, in the end, was not prepared to understand or embrace it. That is why Gibellina Nuova is prophetic: a grand utopian project was undertaken in a land and within a social fabric ill-suited to receiving it (much like the communist revolution in Russia).

But art is for the few, whilst the city is for everyone. Il Cretto di Burri, as the title suggests, is a fissure and indeed divides: for the art world, it is an absolute masterpiece, a place of pilgrimage; for ‘ordinary people’, it is a concrete slab that feels like a tomb (everyone is always against concrete slabs, yet Italy is one huge concrete slab). Gibellina Nuova has countless works of art; there’s one on every corner, so I thought I could choose a wall to paint on, so as not to take up any more public space. I selected an abandoned open space, enclosed on three sides, adjacent to the town’s main square, hidden away because bulldozers and lorries used to be parked there, with three beautiful, large, bright green and lush bushes that defy neglect and abandonment. The artwork I painted consists of two banknotes – the 500-euro note and the 500,000-lire note – four paintings in total, as they represent the front and back of the notes. In the past, religion was depicted because it was the cornerstone of social life; today it is money, and that is what I have done, because you don’t mess about with money. Money is the sole reason for living in our time and for our very existence; banknotes are the most coveted objects, the most frequently seen, yet also the least closely examined – who noticed that the 10,000-lire note from the 1970s featured a portrait by Andrea del Castagno? And they’re strange things: on the 500,000-lire note, is it possible to reproduce a portrait by Raffaello Sanzio or depict The School of Athens and place a figure on it that corresponds to an arbitrary value without resorting to any great artifice? A note barely larger than a tear of toilet paper that’s worth half a million lire – or rather, 250 euros. I also believe that the region most ‘seduced’ by money is Sicily; here, everything is extreme and phantasmagorical, from the art of pastry-making to the interiors of palaces; money grants power and freedom from constraints, and on the island of Sicily it seems to me that power and freedom from constraints are very serious matters. So, painting a large banknote of high value—one that also features ‘lofty’ images of works of art and architecture—truly encapsulates the great ambiguity and artifice of the bank-note (I’m writing it exactly like that). But ultimately, isn’t reproducing a banknote a criminal offence (without the word ‘facsimile’)? And reproducing it almost fifty times larger – isn’t that an even greater offence? Last but not least, considering that in recent years many artists have taken issue with capitalism, I believe that to represent, through art – the pinnacle of the capitalist system – a banknote, the symbolic object of capitalism, is to point out, in its sheer scale (more than 100 square metres of painting), the devil’s dung. Art does not judge, but points out; it does not provide answers, let alone opinions (is there anyone on the face of the earth, apart from a few bankers, a few estate agents and a few country folk, who praise capitalism?), but rather, it indexes – that seems to me to be an appropriate term: to index. Art indexes a subject, a figure. I have indexed two banknotes, symbols of capitalism, which is nothing other than the only way a society can exist today, because capitalist society is nothing other than a society of desires. And desires are the only thing that gives humanity its existence, even if they come at a high price – a very high price indeed.

Same as yesterday. According to Vito Acconci, art has become (or has once again become) something only for the rich. Years ago, I ran a workshop in a prison in Bologna and, when I asked a South American female prisoner, ‘What do you think of art?’, she replied, ‘Ah, like ballet… that’s for the rich’. In short, it seems to me there’s no escaping it. But in this age of political correctness, participation, sharing and populism, it would appear that the only place where art remains free is precisely within the circles of the wealthy, in their salons – and, sadly, that’s not just a joke. Some argue that street art is the true form of free and popular art, but it’s only popular because it’s colourful, illustrative and, above all, moralising: in the works of Banksy, as in those of Blu, you can always tell where good lies and where evil lies, and moralising art is always a right old mess, but people – just like politicians – always want to know where black and white lie: “What does that mean?” or the variation “But what’s the message?”. This is the only question they ask and the only one that interests them. What if there were no message at all – or at least no clear message? In a world ruled by demagogues, CEOs and priests who concern themselves with and worry about the future, we are left with art that looks at the other side of the coin. Always be wary of contemporary art exhibitions that use terms like ‘archaeology’, ‘memory’ and ‘future’: it’s all rubbish. The function of art today is to escape administration, good taste, beauty and the common good. Art is elitist, but not for those with a credit card, rather for those with the time to look and reflect. Of course, who has that sort of time these days? Time is expensive. You have to be well-off, and you have to pay for a ticket at museums (though it’s interesting that you have to pay to see a painting by Giorgio Morandi at the Mambo in Bologna, whereas it’s free in the private art galleries on Via D’Azeglio or at David Zwirner’s in New York).

In 2003, I held a successful exhibition at the Maze Gallery in Turin entitled “La mia casa è la mia mente” and staged the gallery as a sort of Egyptian tomb, where I displayed works featuring various arrangements of furnishings reminiscent of the homes where I had lived. At the entrance there was a photocopied copy of a text I’d written, so that anyone could take it and read it; it was a spontaneous piece, and it seemed to me that this text, composed at a particular moment, shared the same nature as my artworks. That is why I subsequently wrote texts ending with a sentence that read ‘this text is not a piece of writing but a work of art’ – to convey that what I exhibit as a work of art, just like my writing, shares the same nature; that is, I create and write as if ‘ex cathedra’, in my role as an artist. Everything I do in this – I would say – psychological ‘state’, including my writing, is a work of art. I’m not sure, however, whether the articles I’ve written for both the Bologna edition of La Repubblica and the Bologna edition of Il Corriere—about sixty in total over the course of a decade—are also works of art. These writings sketch out, reflect on, contextualise and depict the city of Bologna, covering what takes place in its political and social life, as well as in relation to art. In other words, I write spontaneously to express a sense of unease, and I believe that creating works of art has to do with expressing that unease. And one creates works of art because what’s on offer is lacking, is missing; so one must create something that isn’t there to try and get by in this vale of tears. I think the artist has the privilege of looking at things from the outside. I was a Florentine and I am no longer a Florentine. I was a Bolognese and I am no longer a Bolognese. I was Italian and I am no longer Italian. I was a member of the middle class and I am no longer a member of the middle class. I was a Christian and I am no longer a Christian. One must write, because otherwise others will say obvious things about one's works, or what is expected to be said – and these days, only certain things are ever allowed to be said (I switched from La Repubblica to Il Corriere, because they censored me too much; and people say that Italy isn’t exactly at the forefront when it comes to press freedom, then I also tried writing for "Il Giornale dell’Arte", but after two articles – one of which went unpaid – they stopped replying to me; this is the situation, a tragic one in Italy). So in every publication or catalogue, I always try to write something. Only I hold the key to my works; what do others know about them?

More on the story of the convent – see above. My grandmother Tosca, a generous woman, a member of Catholic Action, a talkative and pleasure-loving woman – everything went through her mouth; she lived to eat. ‘What are you having for dinner tonight?’, she described herself as ‘an old-school Bolognese’, she hated the Tuscans; she gave me a flat she’d inherited on Via Guerrazzi in Bologna, and so, once I’d moved in, I set about figuring out how to furnish it so I could live there comfortably. Because things speak; because ever since I was a child I’ve lived in many houses, and everything around me – in the silence of being an only child – spoke. And if things – the chandeliers, the rugs, the folding tables, the bar cabinets, the bedside tables, the chairs and the tables – speak, then they mustn’t jangle your nerves and they must also keep quiet. Spaces speak and disturb, and I was deeply disturbed by the things happening around me.

Even today, I have not determined whether I experienced something unusual, prophetic or simply incredible. In 1979, my mother took me, along with a friend of hers, to eat pizza at Piedigrotta in Bologna. It was also the ‘Year of the Child’, and my mother asked, ‘What are they doing for you?’. Because they were supposed to be doing something to resolve ‘the situation’. ‘The situation’ was our family situation. So when I went to live on my own, I tried to create a space that was completely different from anything I’d ever experienced before – which had been the tradition of fine 19th-century and early 20th-century furniture. At the same time, I felt the need to start doing something. I’d graduated a few years earlier with a degree in Oriental History from the University of Bologna, specialising in Iran and what was once called the Middle East (a name that’s now contested). So I decided I had to tell the whole story. Through words and objects.

I do not work, but I think and act. I am constantly presenting numerous projects in public spaces, but nothing ever happens; politicians are not interested – they are intimidated. In Bologna, the public art commission – made up of art historians and critics – unanimously ruled that I could not create a mural: ‘inappropriate’, they wrote. And so I have recently published a book, "Gli Angeli degli Eroi", with Castelvecchi, which recounts this story. Art must never be censored. Today, we’re taking a step backwards. And I’ve been censored by all those who describe themselves as progressive, as left-wing. Luca Beatrice was somewhat right to say that the left is conservative when it comes to art (the right sometimes ‘lets things through’ more readily, but perhaps not because it’s more liberal, but because it cares little about it, unlike the left, which believes it’s its own private domain). The difference between a Western democratic country and an ‘Eastern’ one lies solely in freedom of expression, and in Bologna, in the art world today, it does not exist. I propose projects – and not just in Bologna – but organisations, management teams and administrations say no, as has happened to me with Anas, Palazzo Venezia and the National Roman Museum. Today, an artist is expected to wait for ‘their’ call, but if you take the initiative, that’s when the problems begin. This is what I’m working towards: giving voice to my thoughts, my images and my urgent concerns. But perhaps that’s as it should be; if there’s one word that sums up what it means to be an artist, it’s ‘conflict’. And I reckon it’s also the most fitting word for these times.

In 2007, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation invited me to the “Ambient Tour” exhibition, one of the first exhibitions to address environmental issues. As an artist, the subject has never interested me (and still doesn’t), so I interpreted ‘the environment’ in a broader sense, and the sea came to mind – something I am absolutely terrified of – and I immediately recalled a black-and-white photograph from late June 1980 in "Il Resto del Carlino", the newspaper my grandparents used to read. It was 29 June 1980, and the black-and-white photograph was nothing other than the sea – newspapers were in black and white back then – and it showed a white mannequin, which was one of the first bodies to surface from the sea following the Ustica massacre. I remember that day well. So, for the exhibition in Turin in 2007, I displayed this ‘outfit’ that I had designed for the Itavia DC-9, as if the aeroplane were still brand new, as if it were still about to take off. In 2010, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Ustica massacre, I was asked by the Association of Victims of the Ustica Massacre to exhibit that work in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna.

A long time ago, before Google, when people travelled, they used atlases and maps, and my grandfather kept those published by the Touring Club in his car – covering his local area, namely Bologna and the surrounding region. I thought that if you gathered all those maps – the complete collection – you could piece together a vast, united Italy, and so a map measuring over 5 metres by 4 metres emerged.

In 2016, my mother, Anna Franchini in Favelli – as she was known at the time – passed away. She lived on the first floor at 21 Via Guerrazzi in Bologna. When the flat was empty, I painted a wall in every room depicting my family history. In the former study, I painted an advert for a sparkling wine in glossy enamel on a black background; it was called ‘Top della Gancia’, famous in the 1970s. They also made a smaller version which my father called ‘toppino’. The advert read: ‘Here comes Top, challenging the old toast.’ More than the armoured vehicles and the repression on the streets, it was advertising that swept everything away with its seductive products. Top.

Like many middle-class families who loved art partly for pleasure and partly out of a sense of duty, my family also owned the famous “I Maestri del Colore” booklets by the Fabbri Brothers. For many years, they served as a go-to reference. So I thought that to celebrate this great work, I could create a collage on each cover, and I chose the wrapper that encases the Ferrero Rocher chocolate, another great Italian classic. For each instalment, I created a new figure on the cover of this great history of (Western) art. A monumental work comprising 278 paintings.

When the director of the Riso Museum in Palermo asked me what had struck me about the city, I replied: the ‘scarrabili’. The ‘scarrabili’ are steel skips and can still be found in Palermo today; there are hundreds of them throughout the city, parked both on the outskirts and in the centre, some empty, some full of rubble, some full of rubble and rubbish, and others full of rubbish. This is what makes Palermo unique; in no other city are there so many ‘scarrabili’: it is the city’s defining feature. For my exhibition ‘Sicily and Other Figures’, I hired two ‘scarrabili’ and painted them with a pattern devised by an English artist, which was later adopted by the Royal Navy to paint their ships in the belief that it might confuse submarines. At the end of the exhibition, the two roll-on/roll-off lorries, painted in this way, were returned to the company and are now back doing their hard work. Recently, I saw one of my works on a street in Palermo full of rubble.

My grandfather was a keen stamp collector; in fact, when the British colonies were sold off, he used the proceeds to renovate his house, which had been damaged by bombing; those little pieces of paper, especially back then, were worth a fortune. The Kingdom of Italy was our country less than a century ago. Today, there is no object more obsolete than the postage stamp; the younger generations don’t even know what it is. Although, when I ran a workshop in prison, one inmate told me that they still used them to send letters to their families. In any case, stamps are classified by value, not by colour.

I have been living in the Apennines in Savigno, in the province of Bologna, since 2000. I wanted to turn the house – which was a former barn – into an art project, but I wasn’t granted permission because the building is close to an ancient church. By chance, I heard about a building plot in Montepastore, a little further away, and so, almost five years ago, I decided I wanted to build an artist’s house. It was recently completed and I’ve only just moved in. It’s called Villa i Tigli and is clad in over 500 square metres of old aluminium window frames – the very ones that have blighted the town. They are, in fact, made of anodised aluminium. I wanted it to be a large, spontaneous composition. There’s also a fountain that draws on the tradition of Italy’s great squares.

I have always liked signs which, like pronouncements, point and ‘call out’. They are like apparitions. This one, opposite Villa i Tigli, is positioned so that it faces the valley; that is where the sun rises every morning. Every day is a new day and, for us Westerners, it is The Day.

A great Italian tradition was that of tin boxes, which came in a thousand shapes and colours and contained biscuits, sweets and various treats. Sometimes people bought them more for the beauty of the boxes than for their contents. I like to collect them; then I cut them, trim them, press them and assemble them in various ways. Inside, they have their own special sheen and brilliance. Then I admire these gleaming creations of mine.

Here are the two most sought-after banknotes: the 500,000 lire note and the 500-euro note.

I’ve already written about this – quite a lot, I’d say – in the interview.