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Ettore Favini (Italy, 1974) |
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Memory, time, the landscape and man’s relationship with the environment are the central themes of Ettore Favini's work. His early pieces obsessively question themselves about subjective memory and the Proustian relationship that it establishes with objects, and probe the concept of time and the perception of self. |
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In 2006, Favini’s Verdecratoda won the Artegiovane Award. The project involved a district on the outskirts of Turin that was once a farming community and was subsequently transformed into a working-class satellite of the FIAT factory. Verdecuratoda focused on the historical memory of the district by planting roundabouts and urban settings with old local fruit trees, thus connecting the location’s past with an ecological and sustainable present.
In 2007, whilst working at The Italian Academy in New York, Favini's work combined the idea of time with the notion of landscape. The endangered gardens of the Lower East Side, threatened daily by property speculation, became the focus of an awareness operation. Favini offered visitors a bench to contemplate the gardens, awakening awareness of the precious but ephemeral community gardens.
La verde utopia, produced by CCCS for Platform, is a video interview of Gilles Clément, author of Manifesto of the Third Landscape and The Planetary Garden, by Ettore Favini and Alessandra Sandrolini. Alongside, the portraits of the great founders of contemporary ecological thought pay him tribute.
The interview proceeds by analysing the concepts of “third landscape”, referring to residual areas colonised by spontaneous vegetation, and “planetary garden”, or the world seen as an enclosed place – a garden in the true etymological sense of the term – within the biosphere. From the critical analysis of Darwinian thought to the appeal for social and political commitment to serve as gardeners in the cultivation of the planetary garden, Clément's "realist utopia" vindicates a fundamental awareness for contemporary man. A new political project is required, capable of accepting the idea of partial de-growth in economic terms to develop new growth of intangible values, attentive to biodiversity as a global and transversal principle – a value that is currently misunderstood and constantly threatened. |
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La verde utopia, 2009
video DVD, 26’ 59’’
photo portraits on baritated paper 18 x 24 cm each
installation produced by CCCS, Florence
Courtesy the artist.
Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra |
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La verde utopia, 2009
video DVD, 26’ 59’’ with conversation between
Ettore Favoni, Gilles Clément, Alessandra Sandolini
Courtesy the artist
Produced by Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina,
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze |
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