calendario eventi  :: 

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26/1/2007

Lara Favaretto

Cuchifritos Gallery / Project Space, New York

Lost and Found City

Favaretto's work consists of a suitcase, contents unknown, left alone in the gallery space, that invokes a scene of abandoned personal belongings, traveling, trafficking, and the presumed dangers associated with unattended baggage in public spaces. The suitcase project was initiated in 2005 when Favaretto learned about a state-run company that organizes auctions for unclaimed "lost and found" items from the Italian railway system. She was intrigued when she realized that homeless people were buying suitcases for a few euros without any knowledge of their contents—personal belongings either sadly lost or easily forgotten by their original owners. The project began when Favaretto attended one of these auctions and purchased a suitcase.

In her installations, performances, films, and photographic work, Favaretto creates situations and atmospheres that are in continuous metamorphosis, and that gain power in relation to the viewers' memories and experiences. Viewers are invited to participate in the process of creating meaning for, and stories about, the objects. Favaretto's improvisatory work invokes a magic realism, in which the unconscious and the dreamlike proliferate in positive and negative encounters with the real.

Favaretto's suitcase piece migrates from *Cuchifritos* to the *Storefront for Art and Architecture* in March, where it will be recontextualized with the works of the other artists participating in *Lost and Found City*: Caitlin Berrigan & Michael McBean, Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Jonah Freeman, Mark Koven, LURE, Mads Lynnerup, Jill Magid, Costa Vece, and Stephen Vitiello. The exhibition opens

at the *Storefront for Art and Architecture* on *Saturday, March 3*, and is on view through *Saturday, March 24*. There will be also be a performance at *Orchard *in early March (date to be announced). *Lost and Found City* is an exhibition project that reflects upon how space is claimed in cities. CCS Bard graduate students Lauren Benanti, Daniel Byers, Vincenzo de Bellis, Anat Ebgi, Edith Tyler Emerson, Milena Hoegsberg, Sabrina Locks, Nicole Pollentier, Terri Smith, and Niko Vicario developed *Lost and Found City* in their first-year practicum, supervised by Joshua Decter, an independent curator and CCS faculty member.

For this project, emphasis is placed upon various phenomena within areas of New York City, such as Nolita and the Lower East Side. The individual exhibition components occur at different times and locations, including at the *Storefront for Art and Architecture*, *Cuchifritos,* and *Orchard*. Exhibition participants reflect a diversity of artistic and cultural practices, including fictional, autobiographical, analytical, politically/socially engaged, poetic, and psychogeographic responses to urban life.

The project examines the intersection of private and public settings, as well as the metaphorical "owning" of locations based upon personal events. The relationship between the private urban narratives that we invent is compared to the constant flux of the city at large. Where do history and memory intersect? How does subjectivity map itself onto community? The project seeks to connect the urban present to the past, articulating cycles of dispossession and reclamation within city space. This pattern is symbolic of the city's continuous losing and finding of itself, including its citizens' gains and losses in relation to the cultural, economic, and political systems of a particular metropolis. The New York urban environment, for example, is characterized by an accelerating privatization of public space, as well as by gentrification and development that perpetrate an antihistorical and impersonal experience of neighborhoods. *Lost and Found City* proposes that there is a continuous oscillation of loss and gain within urban flux, and is a dramatic interplay between winners and losers in terms of power: political, economic, and subjective. That which is lost is usually reactivated and repurposed within urban space, for better and worse.

The Storefront show comprises a number of newly commissioned and modified works that reactivate the space, including recorded olfactory tours of the urban environment created by Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean, designed for visitors to remap and renavigate Nolita and the Lower East Side; architectural/urban investigations and pedagogical projects of CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy); Jonah Freeman's imaginary megabuilding as city; a new outdoor urban projection/intervention by LURE (Aaron Igler plus collaborators); Mark Koven's real-time, live-feed interactive/participatory work that explores history, geography, and the claim of territory; Mads Lynnerup's performative-video infiltrations of other people's navigations of the neighborhood's streets; Jill Magid's performance about her metaphorical seduction of a New York City police officer in the subterranean environs of the subway system; Costa Vece's flags made of a bricolage of discarded clothing that contest national/local identities; and Stephen Vitiello's sound installation that creates a provocative interpenetration of city and nature.

About Lara Favaretto
Born Treviso, Italy, 1973. Lives and works in Turin, Italy.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies
Location: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
The Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present day. Founded in 1990 by Marieluise Hessel and Richard Black, the Center initiated its graduate program in curatorial studies in 1994. The curriculum is specifically designed to deepen students' understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating exhibitions of contemporary art, particularly in the complex social and cultural situations of present-day urban arts institutions. With state-of-the-art galleries, an extensive library and curatorial archive, and access to the remarkable Marieluise Hessel collection of more than 1,700 works, students at the CCS Bard gain both an intellectual grounding and actual experience within a museum.

Opening: january 27, 2007

Cuchifritos
120 Essex Street - New York
Hours: Monday through Saturday, noon to 5:30 p.m.

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