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Flavio Favelli’s New Mixage Up at the Zeri Foundat...

Flavio Favelli’s New Mixage Up at the Zeri Foundation in Bologna

«BOTTLE, WHOSE MYSTERIOUS DEEP / DO’S TEN THOUSAND SECRETS KEEP, / WITH ATTENTIVE EAR I WAIT; / EASE MY MIND, AND SPEAK MY FATE. / SOUL OF JOY! LIKE BACCHUS, WE / MORE THAN INDIA GAIN BY THEE. / TRUTHS UNBORN THY JUICE REVEALS, / WHICH FUTURITY CONCEALS. / ANTIDOTE TO FRAUDS AND LIES, / WINE, THAT MOUNTS US TO THE SKIES, / MAY THY FATHER NOAH’S BROOD / LIKE HIM DROWN, BUT IN THY FLOOD. / SPEAK, SO MAY THE LIQUID MINE / OF RUBIES, OR OF DIAMONDS SHINE. / BOTTLE, WHOSE MYSTERIOUS DEEP / DO’S TEN THOUSAND SECRETS KEEP, / WITH ATTENTIVE EAR I WAIT; / EASE MY MIND, AND SPEAK MY FATE». Extract from the famous book V of The Adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. (Translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromart, c.1640).

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

The poem you read is the famous ode to the Goddess-Bottle, a character from the well-known French Renaissance anti-epic. François Rabelais (c. 1483-1553) was not the first one to realize the considerable contribution that alcoholic beverages offered to the European way of life of the time; in fact, nowadays this suggestion is no longer limited to the literary genre, rather, it spreads to objects of design, representing the typical savoir-vivre of Italy. On the occasion of ArtCity Bologna 2025 and Arte Fiera, Flavio Favelli returns to issue of the relationship between content and container, the idea of containment and the static form that encloses liquid matter, changing its appearance. His new intuition takes us to the former Renaissance convent of the Church of S. Cristina, and more precisely to the rooms of the former dormitory for nuns, now housing the splendid library of the Zeri Foundation. The exhibition is a new opportunity to increase the number of visitors to the library who from 16 January to 18 March 2025 will enjoy an installation specially designed by the artist for that specific space: the reading room. Students and researchers will be able to alternate the bookish study with the admiration of the shelves built by the artist with recycled materials, which rise in the center of the bright room, creating an effect of dynamism in the environment.

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

However, the shelves are not the focus of the exhibition but the glass bottles placed on them (glued, of course). Bottles are divided horizontally by shelves and vertically by squares as if to form a large chessboard in which, however, the pawns give way to these collector’s items that once contained the best Italian spirits. 216 selected bottles of spirit drinks deprived of the label and displayed on four wooden shelves, searched, reworked and found, measuring 268x191x33 centimeters each, while the bottles have the most varied shapes and sizes. «The installation for the Zeri Library – Flavio Favelli reports – consists of the exhibition of a series of bottles that I have been collecting for many years. They are bottles of Italian spirits without their original label, which I had previously removed. Historic bottles that have had great fortune since the post-war period. Bitters, liqueurs, vermouth, aperitifs, spirits; in every Italian region we can find a great tradition of drinks as well as several companies that work hard to communicate their product with new and attractive shapes, which entered the people’s imagination. This installation questions the shape and aesthetics of the bottle, always in the background compared to the label. The operation also seeks to relate two emblematic objects, books and bottles, which have marked our time as much as our history of art for centuries».

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

The spirit of an era in all respects: History explained through everyday objects, simple symbols of leisure and fun; of consumerism, poetry and virtue. The removal of the labels from the bottles does not give them anonymity. On the contrary, it elevates them to relics of an immediately recognizable era, an era in which the joie de vivre had all-Italian names: Lambretta and Campari. At the same time – devoid of any geographical indication that could catalogue them by production, expiration, bottling, storage advice and price – the bottles displayed in these failed showcases are like people in suspense, waiting at the crossing of a threshold that separates two ages: homeless and without papers; struggling in-between a past of glory destined to fade away in order to make room for an uncertain future. Nevertheless, Favelli’s intent is not to implement a nostalgic operation, but to try to understand, to remember, with a new magnifying glass, years full of both frenzy and opposing thrusts. The chosen lens is the distorting and garish glass of bottles, emptied of the liquid they originally contained and refilled with chemical substances that mix sugars and colorants in order to give the visitor’s eye a continuous dialogue between the glass, the liquid and the light penetrating from the windows. The emptying of the bottles that undergo the ingestion of a new substance can also be read as a passage towards a new collective identity, a new phase in the history and the economy of the Italian country.

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Drawing on a past rich in influences, as the exhibition curator Roberto Pinto suggests, Favelli does justice to objects usually considered just as surrounding of more relevant subjects, which have remained unnoticed because they usually matter less than their contents, without taking into account the attraction of the human eye for the fascinating shape of the bottle. It is like telling a wll-known story through the naïve gaze of a minor character, confined at the margins of the story and yet, precisely because they are at the margins, they are able to take a better look to the actions of the giants who are crossing pages. A first version of New Mixage up had already been presented in 2022 at Bar Vittorio Emanuele in Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna. It was a sort of preview, built through a selection of single-brand bottles, all belonging to the Montenegro Group. In that case, the bottles appeared in their usual context, but at the same time, the lack of visibility of their label made the object and its presence Unheimlich. In this much larger and more articulated presentation, the dialogue that New Mixage Up establishes with books stands out. Both in formal terms – it enhances the verticality with which they are presented and the displaying of the bottles compares almost mirror-like with the many books stacked on the shelves of the library – and by configuring themselves as two containers of memories and food for thought. The installation, which becomes almost a stained-glass window, stands as a cathedral of memory.

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

Flavio Favelli, Nuova mixage up, installation view at Fondazione Zeri, photo credit, Trapezio-Roveda, courtesy the artist and Galleria Francesca Minini

And it is clear that, when one takes bottles into question, one cannot help but thinking of the work of the famous Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, considering also that the library of the Zeri Foundation is located right in Piazzetta Morandi, no more than a hundred metres from the house of the Bolognese painter. Resonances always sought by Favelli’s work but which on this occasion seem to amplify even more the interpretative possibilities of his work. This new installation also plays on two complementary registers in Favelli’s work: a “family lexicon”, almost completely autobiographical, and a social dimension that re-emerges from the shared reality that makes these objects the heritage of at least all the people who have lived in Italy. But it is also a social dimension as it can be appreciated by the whole community without obstacles to the transmission of the concept of the installation which aims to being understandable and effective even for a visitor who does not know the peculiar history of the Italian liqueur market at all; nor has any interest in this particular aspect of our industrial design. What remains in visitors’ minds is the attempt to get in touch, to communicate across the barrier between public and private space; between the present and the past. A dialogue obtained through the constancy and patience of a collector whose attempt is to reassemble the puzzle of historical truth thanks to lost and found fragments of reality.

Giulia Gorella

Info:

Flavio Favelli, Nuova Mixage Up
Curator Roberto Pinto
As part of ArtCity Bologna 2025
www.fondazionezeri.unibo.it
16/01/2025 – 28/03/2025
Fondazione Federico Zeri
Piazzetta Giorgio Morandi 2, 40125 Bologna
Visiting hours: Monday-Friday, 10.00-17.30
Free admission
Opening hours during ART CITY Bologna and special events
Friday 7 February from 18.00 to 22.00 > special evening with the artist and the curators
Saturday 8 February 10.00 – 22.00
Sunday 9 February 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday 13 February 17.30 > Talk with the artist. Flavio Favelli in dialogue with Roberto Pinto


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