The MAN Museum is pleased to announce Arrivederci, a solo exhibition by Ettore Favini, curated by Chiara Vecchiarelli.

Ettore Favini’s work has been built for over ten years around the relationship between the work and the environment in which it is inserted, be it an ecosystem, the memory of a life or a collective narrative. In fact, the environment itself takes on a generative function, in its being the object of investigation and at the same time, thanks to the experience of using the work, an instrument for the analysis of the relationship between man and space.

Arrivederci is an exhibition project that lives through different moments. Divided into two phases – a double solo exhibition at the MAN in Nuoro and the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa – the project finds a textual extension in the volume created by the publisher Humboldt Books, specialized in visual arts and travel literature.

For this project, Favini developed an itinerary of exploration in the territory of Sardinia, immersing himself in the narratives of the island weavers. Driven by the desire to come into contact with one of the oldest traditions of the Mediterranean basin, the artist visited the numerous textile workshops present in the area, receiving over one hundred fabrics as gifts from the people he met (artisans, artists, stylists…). The individual fragments, and the stories they tell, constituted the material from which a new corpus of works came to life. In particular, in the works created for the MAN, the relationship between the warp and the weft is transfigured into a new relationship between time and space: the different temporalities of the events that created the texture of the experiences encountered converge, for the period of the exhibition, in the space of the work.

Made up of the many threads of a common narrative, the exhibition will at the same time constitute a double homage to the sea. If the cruise sails arrive from the sea and will contribute – together with the fabrics collected in Sardinia and dyed the blue of Genoa – to compose the installation that will be visible at Villa Croce, above all the shape of the large sail made with the donated fabrics comes from the sea which will pass through the halls of MAN. It is therefore literally like a sail that the memories linked to the different fabrics unfold in the exhibition; a choral portrait of the Island that transforms the temporal limbo that the title announces into the wish to see each other again soon, that every exhibition brings with it.

During the course of the two exhibitions in Nuoro and Genoa, which will take place a short distance from each other, a work created by Favini will travel on board a ship en route between Sardinia and Liguria, making waves that connect the two lands an exhibition venue on par with the museums involved.

The publication will complete the project by presenting, in addition to a rich array of texts and images, an unpublished writing by the artist which recounts the experience of collecting fabrics and the stories of the island and the way in which these are conveyed in the work and, finally, in the exhibition.

Ettore Favini (Cremona, 1974) lives and works in Milan. He has exhibited in important national and international institutions including: Ocat, Shanghai (2015); PAC, Milan (2014); Pastificio Cerere Foundation, Rome (2013); PAV, Turin (2012 and 2010); Rice Museum, Palermo (2011); ISCP, New York (2009); Song Eun Art Space, Seoul; Futura Space, Prague; Gallery of Modern Art, Milan; MA.GA, Gallarate; CCCS Strozzina, Florence (2009); Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2008); Italian Academy of Columbia University, New York (2007); French Academy, Rome; American Academy, Rome (2009); Olivetti Foundation, Rome (2006);