Poubelle de table [Table trash]

Poubelle de table [Table trash] (2024) is a work born and then developed from a corpus of archival images linked to the world of the fine dining that I have accidentally found in an abandoned hospitality institute in a mountain village in northern Italy.

Poubelle de table [Table trash] (2024) is a work born and then developed from a corpus of archival images linked to the world of the fine dining that I have accidentally found in an abandoned hospitality institute in a mountain village in northern Italy.

The unexpected encounter with these images placed me first, and then throughout the creative process, in the position of reading, analysing and interpreting these images, which challenged me for their content and materiality. I continued this process of collecting through accumulation by integrating other images taken from old books, objects found in recycling centres and pictures I created, combining them to create new meanings.

What particularly interested me when I looked at the archive images relating to the restaurant environment was the rigour, precision and sophistication of the gestures. These gestures recall ideas of excellence, exemplary behaviours and values that exist in Italian and more generally in European culture since the Renaissance period.

In this project, I use the space of the table as a site to question the authoritarian patriarchal society, obsessed with rules and order, where rigour, discipline and rationality impose codes and ideal models of behaviour. Through black and white pictures, I introduce my own body as an opposite site to resist the authority represented by the table. I move objects from their original locations; I imagine new relationships with everyday spaces and objects; I reintroduce the dirty through the materiality of damaged archival images; I deploy defined forms, because it is in the formlessness that a potential space for freedom appears.