Lara Favaretto
Project for Some Hallucinations
‘It is not important to know whether the Queen will come to the fair or not because, once the news of my inviting her spreads, the image of her visit will already be implanted in people’s minds. It is like when one listens to the relating of an idea that is so powerful it ultimately does not matter if it is ever realized, since there is already enough substance by which to visualize it. I imagine this to be like living surrounded by the empty set of a show, from which the main character is missing, when the end of the show is announced by an unexpected applause thanking all the participants.’
Lara Favaretto, July 2007
The playful, celebratory visual language employed by Lara Favaretto in her sculptures, installations and performances is often wilfully undercut by a simultaneous resignation to failure. Whether inviting a group of friends to try and make a donkey fly, or borrowing and suspending in mid-air a caravan belonging to a community of gypsies, the artist’s enigmatic choreographies gesture towards a theatre of the absurd.
Favaretto drew on the spectacle of the fair to give concrete form to an empty or unfulfilled dream. By inviting Her Majesty the Queen to attend the event and having prepared for the necessary ceremony her attendance would involve, Favaretto encouraged visitors to see the fair as a stage for drama and expectation. With the knowledge of the Queen’s declination, the fantasy is dispersed but the intervention that concluded each day prolonged a sense of occasion, acknowledging and celebrating the reality of the fair itself.
Lara Favaretto (b.1973) is an Italian artist based in Turin. Favaretto has had solo exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2005) and at the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo (2002). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Une seconde une année’ (One Second, One Year), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); ‘Ecstasy: Recent Experiments in Altered Perception’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Venetian Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale (both 2005).
