Arrivederci

For over a month I traveled through Sardinia, exploring its towns and villages to learn more about one of the oldest traditions on the island and in the Mediterranean basin: textiles. I visited over twenty artisan textile workshops, meeting with stylists, craftspeople, dyers, friends, and friends of friends. These visits were invaluable to gain a deeper grasp of the subject I am investigating: warp and weft, which I see as a metaphor for life itself. Over the course of my trip, about a hundred textiles were donated to me. Upon my return, the ferry brought me to Genoa: a port city, the beginning or end of the voyage for anyone coming to or from Sardinia. And in Genoa I discovered the existence of a great textile tradition: Genoese brocade, Zoagli velvet, the indigo dye that along with Genoese denim made blue jeans a legend around the world. Back in the studio, I sewed together these fabrics and their stories, creating a monumental tapestry that is dedicated not just to the people I met, but to the Island as a whole.
The story that follows is my personal travel diary […]; it is meant to give a face and a past to each fabric I collected or that was given to me. Without this story, the works in the exhibition would be incomplete, and the pieces from which they are composed would have no voice. (E.F.)

This book accompanies the artist’s double solo show at MAN (Nuoro) and Villa Croce (Genoa), which took place in 2016 and curated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, author of one of the texts included in the publication together with those by Ilaria Bonacossa, Lorenzo Giusti, Antonio Marras, and Ettore Favini.

Ettore Favini was born in Cremona, Italy 
in 1974. His works map the relationship between people and their environment and tend to be site-specific, developed through a growth process that renders them living organisms, never truly finished: open-ended devices of vision in which the work partakes in life and 
the viewer becomes an active participant.