ОДНА ОСТОНОВКА

THE PALACE WITH TOO MANY NAMES
or
FLAVIO FAVELLI IN TBILISI

by Vittorio Urbani

Flavio Favelli has been invited to participate with a new artwork in Art Caucasus / One Stop section. We will come from Italy to install his work, entering Georgia for the first time in our lives. If it is somehow true that to “leave is like dying”, one can say that to arrive is “like being born again” …
We look with awe to the challenge of a sort of symbolic re-birth in Georgia, which actually means: to be able to see things with different eyes.
A new City, a new work, in a new location. It is not easy even to select an appropriate idea. After discussing several possibilities, and having considered possibile locations suggested by the Organizers, the artist choose a building to work with in Tbilisi city centre.

Rustaveli Avenue, the main fare in the centre of Tbilisi, has always been the target of transformation, and the place where changes in policy and history have been made physically and symbolically visibile. The former Vice-Royal Palace, of elegant classical architecture, became at the time of the Soviet Union the Pioneer Palace; now it is called the Youth Palace. This is a transformation of functions, but first of all of Symbols, which happens in the same place and in the same building. The (now called) Youth Palace will see in October 2007 one more of its many transformations.

It is an oblique kind of transformation: no a change of name, not of function … but a subtle diversion in the Palace history; a tension created against its strong standing for “status quo”.
Let me discuss a little bit this point.
“Status quo” is a Latin expression to define the state of things, the reality created by the balance of powers … for instance the “system” at every level one wants to look at it. It is a shared belief that the Status Quo has an almost sinister strength, and it is able to defend itself at all costs. Not second to other strategies, representation of power is very important in keeping power. That is why, therefore, representational buildings have always been important to the Power. The Palace of Youth having changed names and functions several times – and always at critical, tragic times – retains in itself authority. All these changes of use of the Palace have been risky for its own survival … surely after the Vice-Royal period there have been people requesting the demolition of the Palace. This has already happened many times elsewere: the change of use or demolition of the Royal Palaces in Paris after the French Revolution is among the most dramatic examples. Thanks to this diverse and risky history, it is as if the building – which from now on I will refer to as the “Palace” - has freed itself from the duty to represent this or that … it has won through hard resistance the right to stand by itself.
It has won authority.

Flavio Favelli has already worked in rendering a meaning to dilapidated places – places which have lost their original function, like the vast group of installations in the Dormitories of the railway station in Bologna; or the group of sculptures mimicking fittings and pieces of furniture in a former Church in Venice. In parallel, he has confronted the meaning of places still in function, like the installations and performances he has created in shops, corporate offices and cafès in Turin, Venice and Rome. In these apparently opposed series of works, the trait d’union is the pietas that is to say the compassion towards the place, and the heritage of human memories it retains. But this pietas does not prevent him from challenging the antique and the new meanings of the place and to suggest new ones.

In October 2007 in the calm, marble-lined halls of the Youth Palace, a new and different threat to the Status Quo is posed. The Palace is not ready for this challenge which does not come from rioting crowds, war time crises, or the immensely disruptive “change of hands” from the Communist to the so called Liberal system.
All these were alterations from the outside: like when a castle is besieged.
And the Palace is ready to resist this. Instead, this is a change from within.
Art is making its appareance in the Palace. It is not that innocuous representational kind of art … the art fitting in with the institutional role of the palace … like the big gold-framed historical paintings of Georgian medieval heroes hanging in the half darkness of the salons of the Vice-Royal palace … or black and white framed photographs of dusty smiling faces labouring in mining fields, or of white, well lit rooms where young engineers plan Electric Factories, at the time of the Pioneer Palace …

Flavio Favelli will work with materials sourced locally, using them to construct an engaging dialogue with the location and the history of the Country. Part of his work will be “ready made”. Using old maps of Georgia, and Caucasian Countries, he will relocate lakes, will double cities, will displace borders, will cancel entire chains of mountains. As making real one of the possibile disruptions played by History. But while doing this, he will avoid a direct confrontation with Power. That’s why I have defined, above, his work as being oblique. It is the obliquity of metaphor. A strategy coming from the awareness of the comparative weakness of contemporary visual art towards all the dominant media languages, leads the artist to use instruments of art criticism as artistic tools. Description, de-construction, re-construction of “art objects”, that is to say “art”, become a metaphor for description, de-construction and re-construction of ideas. So ideas get a body through art, through this body they get the chance to penetrate the place of power – the Palace – to actually stand in its physical centre. Metaphorically, it is like when in old times the centre of the palace was entered by the enemy warrior: which was the very moment in which the state of war was decided, and a new Status Quo established.

No, this kind of art does not represent power, it talks by itself.
This art is like a worm which feeds itself with Meaning … and it is a subtle but dangerous worm because its eats from inside. The Meaning which the Palace bears is the memory of its too many names and functions. Of too many triumphs and delusions; hopes and disasters.

All that is gone; now the Palace, enjoying the fictitious tranquillity of Democracy, stands for its own history; an history as usual written by winners, through an endless chain of events, all of them becoming significant only when they manage to challenge the status quo …

But art - and Favelli’s pensive kind of art – is not interested in that …
Art reverses the table and starts over again by playing according to new, different rules and meanings.

Supported by:

Embassy of Italy in Georgia