A historic video installation by Gianfranco Baruchello at the Modena Visual Arts Foundation

The Modena Visual Arts Foundation presents Doux comme saveur (Starting with sweet), a video installation by Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, Italy, 1924) that opens to the public on September 14, 2018 in conjunction with Festivalfilosofia, produced in collaboration with Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, and the Baruchello Foundation, Rome. The videos that make up the installation, shown in the spaces of MATA - Ex Manifattura Tabacchi for the first time after the recent restoration of the original films, are part of a project by the artist on sweet taste, featuring interviews with philosophers, critics, poets and artists of French culture.

In addition, on Saturday, September 15, at 6:30 p.m., Gianfranco Baruchello will meet with the public and discuss the project with Carla Subrizi (President of the Baruchello Foundation, Rome, and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sapienza University of Rome) and Gianfranco Maraniello (Director of Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto).

The origins of the installation go back to 1978, when Baruchello conceived a project involving the creation of a single-copy book and interview film on the theme of sweet taste. The book-object took shape through the artist’s photocopied collection of drawings, magazine and newspaper clippings, and notes: about 150 pages, bound with a thick cardboard cover. A year later, in Paris, the book became the starting point for a long series of interviews. The conversations, conducted by Baruchello himself, began with reflections on sweetness and sweetness: from mother’s milk to fairy tales ( Hänsel and Gretel’s gingerbread house), from the memory of sweet taste to myth, between symbol and reality, culture, anthropology and society.

The interviewees are both factory workers, immigrants, and pastry chefs, as well as prominent cultural figures including philosophers, writers, and psychoanalysts of the caliber of Jean-François Lyotard, Félix Guattari, David Cooper, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Jouffroy, Paul Virilio, Gilbert Lascault, and Noëlle Châtelet. While the former are filmed outdoors or inside their workplaces, the latter are interviewed in their homes or studios. The interviews, which thus began with food-related themes, soon come to focus on philosophical issues around motherhood, death, especially animal and intended for food, eroticism and memory. The informal nature of the interviews builds the film’s setting: everything is improvised, friendly, without technical recording setups, with sometimes background noise. For the filming Baruchello enlisted the collaboration of experimental filmmaker Alberto Grifi.

To learn more you can visit the Fondazione Fotografia Modena website by clicking here.

A historic video installation by Gianfranco Baruchello at the Modena Visual Arts Foundation

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