In Protect Me, in seven installations, Alberto Favaro examines how protection—defined as care for others—necessarily involves sacrificing freedom. All forms of care require some control over the protected person, whether unconsciously accepted (revealing power imbalances) or consciously desired. Protection creates a paradoxical mutual dependency that constrains both protector and protected. Even love, in this light, can be seen as the culmination of this mutual need—a space in which freedom is both requested and relinquished.
The works assembled here traverse a spectrum from the quotidian to the geopolitical, tracing how mechanisms of control and protection manifest across scales of experience. While employing diverse techniques and media, these pieces collectively map the journey from familiar domestic rituals to the more explicitly violent apparatus of institutional power. This exhibition invites dual readings. From the macro perspective, we witness how state-imposed anxieties infiltrate and reshape daily practice, becoming internalized to the degree that individuals perpetuate these very systems of surveillance and control. Conversely, moving from the intimate toward the institutional reveals how personal protective gestures accumulate into larger architectures of power.
The exhibition unfolds from the domestic sphere—the most familiar and intimate terrain—where we protect not only those we love, but also the objects, routines, and privileges that structure our lives. Here, acts of obsessive preservation expose a deeper impulse: not merely to care for things, but to control them; not to use, but to immobilize. In preserving the fragile, we attempt to master the passage of time itself—an existential response to impermanence, loss, and the inevitability of death.
Yet Protect Me expands far beyond the personal. In the political realm, protection has become a dominant logic of our time—often mobilized not to foster cooperation, but to justify division and control. Faced with global crises like climate change, the impulse to erect walls and harden borders reflects a collective failure of imagination, a retreat into defensive isolation at the expense of solidarity. These gestures are not only counterproductive; they embody the absurdity of a world unable to act together.
Moreover, the rhetoric of protection increasingly underpins authoritarian policies. Governments invoke the specter of constant threat to normalize states of exception, where civil liberties are suspended in the name of safety. In this climate, protection becomes a tool of surveillance, coercion, and exclusion—revealing its most sinister dimensions. The historical objects and intellectual references woven throughout serve not as didactic anchors but as reminders of the temporal persistence of these dynamics. Viewers encounter artifacts that resonate across generational memory, suggesting that the tension between protection and control represents not a contemporary aberration but a fundamental condition of social organization.
Rather than advancing theoretical propositions or claiming revelatory insights, these works operate through recognition and discomfort. They illuminate what persists in our peripheral vision—the omnipresent negotiation between safety and surveillance that characterizes modern existence. The varied representational strategies employed here underscore the totalizing nature of these concerns, their capacity to infiltrate every medium, every environment, every scale of human activity.
The material vocabulary deployed across these works enacts the very tensions they interrogate. The progression from aggressive materials—wire, plastic, staples—to the vulnerable surfaces of reworked atlas pages and prints, culminating in the deceptive innocence of wooden children’s toys, mirrors the spectrum from overt domination to insidious normalization. This material hierarchy reflects the varying registers through which control operates: from explicit aggression to subtle infiltration.
The interventions performed upon these objects embody a paradoxical violence. Each manipulation simultaneously destroys and preserves, altering both identity and function while maintaining an ornamental familiarity that suggests nothing has occurred. This aesthetic duplicity—the maintenance of recognizable forms despite fundamental transformation—mirrors how systems of control embed themselves within the comforting veneer of protection and care.
Exaggeration becomes methodology here. The repetitive gestures, the overwhelming occupation of space, the excessive accumulation of protective interventions—these formal strategies reflect the totalizing nature of contemporary security culture. The spatial dominance of these works mirrors the very overpowering behavior they critique, demonstrating how protective impulses can expand unreasonably to claim all available space.
Protect Me asks whether protection can exist without control—and whether care, at both personal and political scales, can be reimagined as a practice of shared vulnerability rather than imposed security.
Article by curator Noura Abdelhafidh
Protect Me is on at at MUŻA from June 6 until July 17
