"Manatthan Club"
Flavio Favelli unplugged with Ilaria Bonacossa
Flavio Favelli unplugged with Ilaria Bonacossa
Flavio Favelli's artistic production, which develops through the constant transformation and rielaboration of objects, creates a unique individual journey. Manatthan Club offers through images, taken from the artist's personal history, the emotional reconstruction of a recent past, with a specific focus on the 60's and 70's. This exhibition, curated by Art at Work, is a snapshot of a peculiar Italian consumer culture narrated through neon signs, furniture, carpets and collages, a metaphor of the country's socio-cultural transformations.
IB: Your production has always developed out of the transformation of real objects: furniture, carpets, neons. Here there is something more at stake, you create an environment, which is evocative of your personal history, a monumental immersive installation?
FF: Yes, it's one space, an image borrowed from my dreams, from my past. It is as if I were always working in order to create an ideal place where I can spend my time. Here I take possession of the gallery. I try to model the place on my memories. I developed a mental environment; I totally transformed the light of the gallery. I always loved neon, the white and ivory ones I saw as a child in offices and law-courts or the coloured ones I saw in the cinemas. In Rome there is still a large Martini coloured neon sign!
IB: The show develops from the logos and signs of Italian 70's brands and is structured as a sort of archaeological investigation of the Italian way of life or better of Italian desires. Are these symbols in some way nostalgic?
FF: In Sicily I saw an absurdly coloured building with Manatthan misspelt in black capital letters which conjured so many images that I had to create this series of works. It's like a flash-back, which retrospectively lights a period of time from the 70's to the 80's, from Sandokan to Maradona. Everything starts from my family life, which has always been full of tensions and failures. I clearly remember the 6th of January 1976 - I was 8 years old - I was watching Sandokan on TV with my mother's and father's half brothers and sisters. The theme from Sandokan, still creates in me emotional upheavals. The same with Panini's stickers and film pictures on the covers of my school notebooks. Sandokan represents the conflict between Good and Evil, between Freedom and Oppression but it's also the last hero of a disappeared world. I miss it as much as I miss the time when there were just two TV Rai channels: the first used to broadcast something new, the other broadcasted the same programs endlessly.
IB: I have always perceived a dose of "removal" in your work, which chooses to suggest an emotion, leaving the audience free to interpret the work. In Manatthan Club you deal with pornography for the first time, why?
FF: The Royal Rouge, double red-light, was a B-cinema in via Rizzoli, Bologna, where today Nike has opened its store. Close to the Ambasciatori cinema and not far from the Contavalli cinema (there were numerous porn movie theatres in the city centre), yet while these two were in secondary streets, the Royal was located in the heart of Bologna, next to the Due Torri, in front of Beltrami, a luxury store, looted and vandalised during student protests. A friend of my mother, Serena, bought a Scirocco Volswagen… At the Royal cinema the posters were green with red text, and since the words were a bit leaked, they looked like they were photocopies. I must have been about 7-8 years old and my mother used to walk faster while we were passing in front of the Royal Rouge, the double porn cinema. From the mid 70's to the 80's, I have been collecting more than a thousand posters of porn-movies. The colours, the titles and the words: Superforbidden, Superporno, Ecstasy, Hard, XXX…Everything is Super: just as Sandokan, Maradona and Porn…everywhere is Porn. As well as America wich is always in the midst of everything, the red and white stars; on a Sex Talent boy there is the picture of Times Square with the Coca Cola logo. Plus the black stars used to censor. Sandokan, repeated endlessly in the theme song, and these posters – SuperPenetration Love, Carnal Play- are just absurd words, fantastic and magic. It felt as if a new world was burning the old one. Then hot Moana! This is poetry, something like Amor Cortese! Finally, that is the evoked world with its neon lights. Porn-titles and arabesque like an encompassing, simple, but effective literature. Porn is eternal and omnipresent.
IB: Choosing porno images is linked to the recent focus on the complex relationships between porn and power? Or instead is Moana Pozzi (an Italian icon) a sign from the past, when even porn-stars were part of a shared social heritage?
FF: The choice is the consequence of my discovery of these posters. I am not interested in dealing directly with the present. Stamps of Italia Turrita, neon, porn, my house, Italy and Sandokan are eternal for me. Their strength came from the fact that they allowed me to escape metaphorically from my family. The porn lights of New York and Martini's neon sign were just an occasion to flee to another possible wonderful and fake world, the real one was too ugly.
IB: Do you feel that some of your recent collage of stamps and stickers, are inspired by Boetti's work?
FF: When the director of Macro asked me to realize an image for the museum lobby in Rome, I chose a postcard dating back to1977 which I sent my father, while he was in the Judicial - Psychiatric Hospital in Castiglione delle Stiviere. On that postcard there was an image of the empress Teodora and a 50 lire green stamp of the series "turrita-siracusana". I often sent my father postcards and letters with those small coloured stamps. I think that making collage with these stamps is a way of piecing things and colours together. My grandfather owned a large stamps' collection and my mother often repeated that they rebuilt our bombed down house selling the "English colonies" section. We used to order stamps by date and value but now I prefer their colour. My grandfather collected stamps in order to give an order to the universe, the sequences and pages were his order and everything had to be catalogued.
IB: Do you always feel the urge to physically appropriate things developing a sort of cathartic process?
FF: Maybe, but at the end I am not seeking any liberation or catharsis. I don't want to free myself from these images and memories. They are my occupation; everyday I think, write, conceive works on this world, which I can't abandon.
IB: How personal are the results of your researches?
FF: It is as if I were narrating my journey with my friends both alive and dead. I think my life and my work are just personal. Somebody once said it seems like we are standing on the floor but actually we are treading on one tile.
IB: Your work often develops out of a painstaking process of composition and assemblage, which is both mechanical and intimate.
FF: I love repetition and the perpetual revival of images and objects. Sometimes situations return and some objects never leave me. Only by putting together 15000 stamps you can see the precision of a nuance of colour. My repetition of the name Sandokan means that it is my world and it is the only one I have. If you are in Palermo and you ask about Sandokan surely somebody will point out a man who, holding a plastic sword, stands next to an ice-cream shop singing the Sandokan theme without remembering the exact words. He's a Sibilla.
IB: Let's talk about Sandokan. In us kids of the 70's it evokes an oriental, exotic and adventorous world. What is it for you today?
FF: One of my collages, that spells Sandokan is a collage of chocolate wraps. Everything shines like malaysian silk, (my guess, as I've never seen them). Sandokan is a paper hero, a myth like Maradona and Moana Pozzi. The fact that today a camorra boss calls himself Sandokan, means that the myth still exists. This is my origin. When the Tiger of Malaysia liberates the young princes, he says: "I delivered you from Brook, but now you must free yourself from your own fears".
IB: The world maps and New York talk about far-away universes seen from an Italian perspective. I think the specific strength of this show is its capacity to tell an Italian story using an international language, in a moment in which our country is living an unforeseen crisis.
FF: The artistic and creative improvisation of the world I choose (Manatthan Club is a sort of night club on one of the most devastated Sicilian roads that links Licata and Gela) is degraded; neon- signs are full of wires and noisy transformers, Sandokan is a paper hero, his duel with the tiger is fake, porn posters are badly printed and violet curtains are beautiful because they are faded. Did we ever recover from the crisis? Sicily is one of my favourite places, yet I would never live there but I often visit and everything is wonderful and at the same time impossible. An Eden: a place you desire but where you can't live. My 'Manatthan Club' is a warehouse where I have united lots of stuff trying to reconstruct a world I don't want to loose. Everything has to be perfect as in an Egyptian tomb: the lights have to work, the curtains have to be clean. There are also four painted iron heating vents, which maybe still work…
IB: Your production has always developed out of the transformation of real objects: furniture, carpets, neons. Here there is something more at stake, you create an environment, which is evocative of your personal history, a monumental immersive installation?
FF: Yes, it's one space, an image borrowed from my dreams, from my past. It is as if I were always working in order to create an ideal place where I can spend my time. Here I take possession of the gallery. I try to model the place on my memories. I developed a mental environment; I totally transformed the light of the gallery. I always loved neon, the white and ivory ones I saw as a child in offices and law-courts or the coloured ones I saw in the cinemas. In Rome there is still a large Martini coloured neon sign!
IB: The show develops from the logos and signs of Italian 70's brands and is structured as a sort of archaeological investigation of the Italian way of life or better of Italian desires. Are these symbols in some way nostalgic?
FF: In Sicily I saw an absurdly coloured building with Manatthan misspelt in black capital letters which conjured so many images that I had to create this series of works. It's like a flash-back, which retrospectively lights a period of time from the 70's to the 80's, from Sandokan to Maradona. Everything starts from my family life, which has always been full of tensions and failures. I clearly remember the 6th of January 1976 - I was 8 years old - I was watching Sandokan on TV with my mother's and father's half brothers and sisters. The theme from Sandokan, still creates in me emotional upheavals. The same with Panini's stickers and film pictures on the covers of my school notebooks. Sandokan represents the conflict between Good and Evil, between Freedom and Oppression but it's also the last hero of a disappeared world. I miss it as much as I miss the time when there were just two TV Rai channels: the first used to broadcast something new, the other broadcasted the same programs endlessly.
IB: I have always perceived a dose of "removal" in your work, which chooses to suggest an emotion, leaving the audience free to interpret the work. In Manatthan Club you deal with pornography for the first time, why?
FF: The Royal Rouge, double red-light, was a B-cinema in via Rizzoli, Bologna, where today Nike has opened its store. Close to the Ambasciatori cinema and not far from the Contavalli cinema (there were numerous porn movie theatres in the city centre), yet while these two were in secondary streets, the Royal was located in the heart of Bologna, next to the Due Torri, in front of Beltrami, a luxury store, looted and vandalised during student protests. A friend of my mother, Serena, bought a Scirocco Volswagen… At the Royal cinema the posters were green with red text, and since the words were a bit leaked, they looked like they were photocopies. I must have been about 7-8 years old and my mother used to walk faster while we were passing in front of the Royal Rouge, the double porn cinema. From the mid 70's to the 80's, I have been collecting more than a thousand posters of porn-movies. The colours, the titles and the words: Superforbidden, Superporno, Ecstasy, Hard, XXX…Everything is Super: just as Sandokan, Maradona and Porn…everywhere is Porn. As well as America wich is always in the midst of everything, the red and white stars; on a Sex Talent boy there is the picture of Times Square with the Coca Cola logo. Plus the black stars used to censor. Sandokan, repeated endlessly in the theme song, and these posters – SuperPenetration Love, Carnal Play- are just absurd words, fantastic and magic. It felt as if a new world was burning the old one. Then hot Moana! This is poetry, something like Amor Cortese! Finally, that is the evoked world with its neon lights. Porn-titles and arabesque like an encompassing, simple, but effective literature. Porn is eternal and omnipresent.
IB: Choosing porno images is linked to the recent focus on the complex relationships between porn and power? Or instead is Moana Pozzi (an Italian icon) a sign from the past, when even porn-stars were part of a shared social heritage?
FF: The choice is the consequence of my discovery of these posters. I am not interested in dealing directly with the present. Stamps of Italia Turrita, neon, porn, my house, Italy and Sandokan are eternal for me. Their strength came from the fact that they allowed me to escape metaphorically from my family. The porn lights of New York and Martini's neon sign were just an occasion to flee to another possible wonderful and fake world, the real one was too ugly.
IB: Do you feel that some of your recent collage of stamps and stickers, are inspired by Boetti's work?
FF: When the director of Macro asked me to realize an image for the museum lobby in Rome, I chose a postcard dating back to1977 which I sent my father, while he was in the Judicial - Psychiatric Hospital in Castiglione delle Stiviere. On that postcard there was an image of the empress Teodora and a 50 lire green stamp of the series "turrita-siracusana". I often sent my father postcards and letters with those small coloured stamps. I think that making collage with these stamps is a way of piecing things and colours together. My grandfather owned a large stamps' collection and my mother often repeated that they rebuilt our bombed down house selling the "English colonies" section. We used to order stamps by date and value but now I prefer their colour. My grandfather collected stamps in order to give an order to the universe, the sequences and pages were his order and everything had to be catalogued.
IB: Do you always feel the urge to physically appropriate things developing a sort of cathartic process?
FF: Maybe, but at the end I am not seeking any liberation or catharsis. I don't want to free myself from these images and memories. They are my occupation; everyday I think, write, conceive works on this world, which I can't abandon.
IB: How personal are the results of your researches?
FF: It is as if I were narrating my journey with my friends both alive and dead. I think my life and my work are just personal. Somebody once said it seems like we are standing on the floor but actually we are treading on one tile.
IB: Your work often develops out of a painstaking process of composition and assemblage, which is both mechanical and intimate.
FF: I love repetition and the perpetual revival of images and objects. Sometimes situations return and some objects never leave me. Only by putting together 15000 stamps you can see the precision of a nuance of colour. My repetition of the name Sandokan means that it is my world and it is the only one I have. If you are in Palermo and you ask about Sandokan surely somebody will point out a man who, holding a plastic sword, stands next to an ice-cream shop singing the Sandokan theme without remembering the exact words. He's a Sibilla.
IB: Let's talk about Sandokan. In us kids of the 70's it evokes an oriental, exotic and adventorous world. What is it for you today?
FF: One of my collages, that spells Sandokan is a collage of chocolate wraps. Everything shines like malaysian silk, (my guess, as I've never seen them). Sandokan is a paper hero, a myth like Maradona and Moana Pozzi. The fact that today a camorra boss calls himself Sandokan, means that the myth still exists. This is my origin. When the Tiger of Malaysia liberates the young princes, he says: "I delivered you from Brook, but now you must free yourself from your own fears".
IB: The world maps and New York talk about far-away universes seen from an Italian perspective. I think the specific strength of this show is its capacity to tell an Italian story using an international language, in a moment in which our country is living an unforeseen crisis.
FF: The artistic and creative improvisation of the world I choose (Manatthan Club is a sort of night club on one of the most devastated Sicilian roads that links Licata and Gela) is degraded; neon- signs are full of wires and noisy transformers, Sandokan is a paper hero, his duel with the tiger is fake, porn posters are badly printed and violet curtains are beautiful because they are faded. Did we ever recover from the crisis? Sicily is one of my favourite places, yet I would never live there but I often visit and everything is wonderful and at the same time impossible. An Eden: a place you desire but where you can't live. My 'Manatthan Club' is a warehouse where I have united lots of stuff trying to reconstruct a world I don't want to loose. Everything has to be perfect as in an Egyptian tomb: the lights have to work, the curtains have to be clean. There are also four painted iron heating vents, which maybe still work…
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