Gianfranco Baruchello Doux comme saveur (A partire dal dolce)

Doux comme saveur (A partire dal dolce), a video installation by Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924) realized on occasion of festivalfilosofia in collaboration with MART, the Trento and Rovereto museum of modern and contemporary art, and Fondazione Baruchello, Rome.The videos making up the installation, projected at MATA – Ex Manifattura Tabacchi for the first time after the recent restoration of the original films, are part of a project by the artist on the taste of sweet, in which he interviews philosophers, critics, poets and artists from French culture.

On Saturday 15 September at 6.30 pm, the artist Gianfranco Baruchello will meet the public and discuss the project with Carla Subrizi (chair of Fondazione Baruchello, Rome and associate professor of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University of Rome) and Gianfranco Maraniello (director of MART, Trento and Rovereto museum of modern and contemporary art).In 1978 Baruchello came up with a project to make a book printed in a single copy and a film of interviews on the theme of the taste of sweetness.The book-object took shape from the artist’s collection of photocopies of drawings, magazine and newspaper cuttings and notes: around 150 pages, bound by a thick cardboard cover.  A year later, in Paris, the book became the starting point for a long series of interviews. The conversations, conducted by Baruchello himself, begin from reflections on sweets and sweetness: from the mother’s milk to fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house), from memories of sweet tastes to myth, ranging through symbols and reality, culture, anthropology and society.

The interviewees are labourers, immigrants, bakers as well as important exponents from the world of culture, including philosophers, writers and psychoanalysts of the calibre of Jean-François Lyotard, Félix Guattari, David Cooper, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Jouffroy, Paul Virilio, Gilbert Lascault and Noëlle Châtelet.While the first are filmed outside or in their place of work, the second are interviewed in their homes or studios.The interviews, starting from topics linked to food, soon come to concentrate on philosophical issues concerning motherhood, death – mainly of animals which will become food, eroticism and memory.The informality of the interviews builds the setting for the film: everything is improvised, friendly, with no technical recording equipment, sometimes with background noise.For the filming, Baruchello was partnered by experimental filmmaker Alberto Grifi.