Federica Balconi
Guastafeste
Curated by Giovanna Manzotti

It is as part of Liliana Moro’s architectural and installation piece | senza | soluzione di continuità that Federica Balconi’s sculpture Guastafeste makes its appearance with an ironic and unsettling air, as much in terms of colour as ones of form and posture. An almost residual element, as if ending up there after some sort of celebration in the square opposite, the work establishes a harmonious relationship with Moro’s piece yet without failing to interfere with its formal rigour. This magenta-coloured object is a sculptural reinterpretation of a festoon that claims space for both action and repose. While with her reflective surfaces, Moro opens the shop window onto the city, reconfiguring it as an active presence within the urban context, Balconi’s gesture reinforces this approach and adds a touch of playfulness and irreverence to the permeable and collective nature of the project.

Guastafeste, once placed in the shop window – despite its aforementioned irreverence and instability – does not look like a foreign object but, on the contrary, fits happily into the framework outlined by Moro, broadening its range of expressive registers and allowing the whole to resonate with a richer variety of notes. Balconi’s intervention thus takes the form of a playful intrusion, but also of a precise gesture, a subtle and refined interference born of a constant exercise in attunement. And it is from this perspective that the two works show their similarity despite their evident diversity: through their common ability to ‘listen’ to the context and to introduce an element which, without dramatic intervention, is at the same time capable of respecting the space, interpreting it and transforming it, demonstrating a profound inclination towards receptiveness. It is a complicity in disruption that both artists seem to have sought. While Moro’s gesture is foundational, Balconi’s expands the field of potential within which the other artists invited to take part in the exhibition programme over the coming months will be called upon to take their turn.

Made up of slender modules of laminated fir and beech wood, laser-cut and painted with quartz paint and matt enamel, Guastafeste is characterised by a compositional and functional configuration that betrays its original form. From a paper element typically hung on a wall or ceiling, here the festoon becomes an architectural trace: a small column resting on the ground and striving to rise up, finding no more than an apparent balance. In this effort, it is as though it were crumbling, collapsing in on itself; yet at the same time it seeks a form, pursues it, perhaps finds it, and it is at that very moment that it turns into something other than itself – a creeping body that gradually detaches itself from its stiffer part or, conversely, a garland whose clearly visible honeycomb structure contracts towards the end of its skeleton. This perhaps occurs to highlight its demeanour through a series of continuous postural adjustments – amplified by the reflective surfaces – which make it appear to us as both self-deprecating and deliberately determined, as it moves towards its entrance, or exit, from the scene.

Giovanna Manzotti