Flavio Favelli's Sicily through the exhibition at the Real Albergo di Palermo

From June 27 to September 8, 2024, the exhibition venue of the Real Albergo delle Povere at the Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palermo will present artist Flavio Favelli’s exhibition, La Sicilia e altre figure, curated by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone. Supported by the Regional Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, promoted by the Riso Museum and realized in collaboration with the Acrobatics Association, the exhibition consists of four thematic nuclei: the Magazine Sicily, the signs, the “scarrabili,” and the barriers, which tell the artist’s relationship with the city of Palermo and with Sicily. The exhibition is the result of a work of recovery and montage of visual elements taken from different contexts, capturing and staging the coexistence of “high” and “low” in Sicilian culture.

Favelli started from his personal collection of Sicily magazines, with which he made a series of collages, to search for tangible signs of an “inspiration that broods under the rubble,” and which, for example, emerges in the “scarrabili,” iron boxes for collecting construction debris that dot the city of Palermo in the unlit signs, in the old transennas in which the identity of the island is expressed in the semi-crafted furniture, improvised constructions, and spontaneous assemblages. The installation La Sicilia e altre figure, which gives the exhibition its title, consists of the framed covers of the magazine Sicilia, composed of 89 issues, published by Flaccovio between the 1950s and 1980s, on which the artist has intervened with assemblages and collages of advertisements from the 1970s and 1980s taken from magazines of costume, news and current events and reassembled together. In line with his research, Favelli also mixes different registers, decontextualizing objects of use by bringing them inside museum spaces, giving solemnity to found materials in which personal and public dimensions coexist: disused and unlit neon signs of historical stores, “scarrabili,” old barriers from the warehouses of the Calogero Di Bona - Ucciardone Prison House, outlining a highly original path by themes and figures. The exhibition Sicily and Other Figures also becomes the common thread linking together institutions that belong to seemingly separate worlds, strengthening the link between museum, prison and city, between the inside and the outside. Born in this context, the launch of the collaboration between the Regional Museum and the prison management, starting from a shared vision of the social importance of art as a lever of change. In conjunction with the exhibition, the artist will also create a site-specific intervention for the green area of the Ucciardone Prison. It is a “container,” transformed into a habitable module, reserved for meetings with the families of inmates, the result of the workshop held by Flavio Favelli on the occasion of the Spazio Acrobazie project, a productive and redevelopment workshop through artistic mediation, curated by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone, the outcome of a co-design between inmates, social-health workers and students.

Acrobatics is a cultural association that deals with social innovation and cultural welfare, adopting contemporary culture as a design and communication strategy to promote social inclusion, equal opportunities, economic development and corporate social responsibility within for-profit and nonprofit institutions. After being a partner in the project “The Art of Freedom” (2019 - 2020), which took place inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison, it is currently the lead partner in the project “Space Acrobatics. Production and redevelopment workshop through artistic mediation” (2022-2024), curated by Elisa Fulco and Antonio Leone, promoted by Fondazione con IL SUD and Fondazione Sicilia. Acrobatics won the 9th edition of the Italian Council Call for Bids with the project “L’Habit Habité” by artist Sissi, and in 2021 the 10th edition of the Italian Council Call for Bids with the project “The Swing of Ingustice” by artist Anila Rubiku, exhibited in the Vierzon Biennial of Art and Architecture (September 2022).

“In the historic center, the art of the past and the scruffy, broken-down iron crate, often filled with rubble and garbage, merge into unprecedented, jarring images, phantasmagorical new postcards. They would look like things from men of toil, from ruthless worlds, barges from Styx carrying rubble and offal from the stones, shards, walls of the city and its layers,” says the artist.

“The museum is particularly interested in Flavio Favelli’s project because it performs a cultural operation of critical historical as well as artistic value,” argues Museo Riso director Evelina De Castro, “It looks through the lens of today’s contemporary visual language at what was the synthesis of yesterday’s contemporary, the magazine ”Sicilia," published from 1953, a decisive year for art in Sicily, to 1982.Today we would call that experiment an observatory on the arts, visual, literary, and immaterial, a total form of communication that brought in artists, curators, academics, and practitioners, such as gallery owners, publishers, and administrators of the public affairs of the newly formed Sicilian Region. An antecedent from which to start again Favelli initiates.

“The site-specific intervention made by artist Flavio Favelli in the green area of the Ucciardone Prison House, the result of the Spazio Acrobazie project, is a further sign of the importance that the Penitentiary Institution reserves for the improvement of meeting places between inmates and their closest family members, including first and foremost their minor children. The coincidence of the installation in the historic penitentiary institution with the opening of Flavio Favelli’s exhibition in the spaces of the Riso Museum’s Albergo della Povere, is an opportunity to confirm the collaboration between the two institutions as a testimony to the desire to spread the concept of art as a vehicle for cultural and social redemption,” says Fabio Prestopino, director of the Ucciardone Prison House in Palermo.

Image: Flavio Favelli, La Sicilia e altre figure, detail (2024; 89 elements, collage on magazines, 32x24 cm each)

Flavio Favelli's Sicily through the exhibition at the Real Albergo di Palermo

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