Lara Favaretto | Thinking Head - Clandestine Talk

Description

Thinking Head was the development of a project that began at Nottingham Contemporary on the occasion of Lara Favaretto’s solo show Absolutely Nothing, curated by Sam Thorne in 2017. It was a multidisciplinary intervention that included several Clandestine Talks, which later, in 2019, also took place in Venice during the 58th Venice Biennale, curated by Ralph Rugoff. The topics hovered over fifty selected keywords that provided the backbone to a conversation held between different participants from various disciplines. Most recently, the Clandestine Talks project took place on the occasion of the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, curated by Michelle Cotton at Mudam Luxembourg.

This project was a complex and decentralised artwork that implicitly mirrored the functioning of the human brain. Referencing Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture Mi Fuma il Cervello (1993), a self-portrait whose head literally fumed, a vapour-producing machine had been installed on the roof of the institutions in Nottingham and Venice so that a constant mist obscured their façades, as if dissolving their cultural authority.

In a far less visible part of this work, different groups of thinkers were invited to periodically gather for clandestine discussions to reflect each time on a single word from a list of fifty different keywords. The talks were held in a hidden place where the participants were free to fully concentrate without distractions or external interactions. All fifty keywords were linked to a group of specific objects. Some of these objects came from the archive, which had been amassed and preserved over the previous 25 years, while others had been specially selected or suggested by others for the project. By mimicking the subdivisions of the mind, the intention was that these grouped objects, connected to individual words, would be processed in each viewer’s mind, resulting in something similar to a very advanced, hyper-technological dimension. The grouped objects were on display at the 2019 Biennale di Venezia and are now visible on the dedicated website that Favaretto created, thinking-head.net.

Period	17 Jan 2023
Event title	Clandestine Talk: Borders : Thinking Head project by Lara Favaretto
Event type	Other
Location	Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map