DANTE ALIGHIERI
“Momentary Monument III” by Lara Favaretto
approx 36.000 sandbags, scaffolding // 450 x 2600 x 2600 cm
Installation view at Piazza Dante, Trento, Italy ‘CIVICA 1989 – 2009, Celebration, Institution, Critique’, Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento, 2010
“Momentary Monument II (The Wall) – commissioned in 2009 by Trento’s Galleria Civica on the occasion of a survey show to mark the museum’s 20th anniversary – made headlines and stirred up a huge political controversy surrounding the value, costs and failures of contemporary art. While it was still under construction, one side of the 36,000 sand-bag ‘fortification’ that Favaretto was creating around the city’s monument to Dante Alighieri, collapsed under its own weight. The statue already had a conflicted history: unveiled in 1896, when Italian-speaking Trento was still under Habsburg rule, the monument was funded by public subscription, with the aim of celebrating Italian culture, language and identity, in a provocative response to the creation in 1889 of a statue of the medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide in the main square of the nearby German-speaking town of Bozen/Bolzano. Favaretto’s original intention with Momentary Monument III (The Wall) had been ‘to create a space of perplexity, a temporal puzzle’, but she later declared that it was only through the work collapsing and becoming the subject of public criticism, rather than merely evoking a state of entrenchment, that it found its real urgency and significance.”
excerpt from Barbara Casavecchia’s article on: https://frieze.com/article/corrosion