Lara Favaretto | Thinking Head - Clandestine Talk

BORDERS

Clandestine Talk | Tuesday 17 January, 10:15am

Richard Baxstrom, James Harrison, Hephzibah Israel and Killian O’ Dochartaigh

Join us for a clandestine talk - live-audio stream discussion around the topic of BORDERS as part of Lara Favaretto’s Thinking Head (2017-2023) project thinking-head.net

Thinking Head is the development of a project which began at Nottingham Contemporary on the occasion of Lara Favaretto’s solo show Absolutely Nothing curated by Sam Thorne in the 2017, a multidisciplinary intervention including several Clandestine Talks that later in 2019 also took place in Venice during the 58th Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff; the topics of which hover over fifty selected keywords providing 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 is a complex and decentralized artwork that implicitly mirrors the functioning of the human brain. Referencing Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture Mi Fuma il Cervello (1993), a self-portrait whose head literally fumes, in Nottingham and Venice a vapour-producing machine was installed on the roof of the institutions so that a constant mist obscured their façade as if dissolving their cultural authority.

In a far less visible part of this work, different groups of thinkers are invited to periodically gather for clandestine discussions to reflect each time on a single word from a list of 50 different keywords. The talks are held in a hidden place where the participants are free to fully concentrate without distractions or external interactions. All 50 keywords are linked to a group of specific objects. Some of these objects come from the archive which has been amassed and preserved over the past 25 years while others have been specially selected or suggested by others for the project. By mimicking the subdivisions of the mind, the intention is that these grouped objects, connected to individual words, will be processed in each viewer’s mind and the result will be 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 Favaretto realized, thinking-head.net