Through a series of fascinating and provocative mixed media artworks and installations at MUŻA until July 17, Favaro delves down into the contemporary reality of the concept of protection, and the relationship between protection —understood as care for another — and liberty both at home and politically.
“Every gesture of care carries with it a degree of control: a dynamic that may be unconsciously imposed or consciously accepted by those who seek protection,” explains Favaro.
The idea grew out of Favaro’s long-standing investigation, through art, into the dynamics of control and protection.
“I’ve always been drawn to the way social and political structures shape our lives—especially through the concept of borders. Over time, this exploration has taken many forms: from intimate, personal attempts to control reality—people, objects, even ourselves—to the existential urge to resist time and mortality, and finally to the broader political sphere, where control becomes a matter of territory and security.
This exhibition brings these threads together, offering different entry points into a shared concern,” he continues. “I hope this exhibition sparks curiosity in the viewer and gently unsettles some of the assumptions we often take for granted. I believe a good exhibition should leave visitors slightly altered—walking away with more questions than they had upon entering, and perhaps a few certainties less. It’s a kind of philosophical problematization, carried out not through argument, but through space and objects.”
Favaro is also an architect, and his artistic research often explores space and its liminal dimensions. “At its core, architecture is the act of enclosing—not only in a physical sense, but also through intangible means such as social or normative boundaries, explains Favaro. “By assigning meaning to space (and thereby excluding other possibilities), architecture inherently performs an act of spatial control and domination.
In this sense, all of Favaro’s studies and artworks are deeply rooted in his architectural background.
Protect Me, 2023-2025, the eponymous artwork in the show, is both startling and uncomfortable to look at. It draws from a familiar, intimate tradition: printed – and often padded – textile panels once commonly found in Maltese homes of the 1970s and 1980s. Favaro reworks these comforting images, introducing sharp metal staples that pierce and compress the fabric of printed cushions, distorting the soft familiarity.
These staples operate in contradiction: they constrain and wound, yet also embellish. Their presence is both violent and decorative—a disruption of domestic innocence. Echoing the visual density of late Gothic altarpieces (as in Gentile da Fabriano), Favaro’s gesture turns ornament into a form of domination, or perhaps care laced with control.
The work explores the ambiguity of protection and probes the fine line between protection and domination. To care for another implies a degree of control, to protect is often to exert force, to claim possession, to immobilize. In the name of safety, the fabric is bound, reshaped, violated. Protect Me asks what we are willing to accept—or inflict—in the name of tenderness.
Continuing the domestic theme, Favero has crafted another installation in the show from furniture and custom plastic slipcovers.
“From the 1950s to the 1980s, it was common to encase living room furniture in custom plastic slipcovers, a practice meant to protect and preserve domestic objects,” he explains and in this work Favero has radicalised this behaviour, combining an obsessive fervour with this act of preservation with so that every surface is shielded, to the point of rendering the covered objects dysfunctional. Here, protection has become a barrier, and a paradox. Can we ever protect objects or ourselves from the passing of time and the inevitability of decay?
The installation suggests that our urge to shield ourselves—whether from physical deterioration or emotional exposure—is less about utility and more about the fear of impermanence, a symbolic resistance to death. It also asks questions about whether the act of preserving is isolating in equal measure: what do we lose of ourselves when we attempt to remain untouched?
Within this piece, a television flickers with motion: a loop of Duck and Cover, the 1951 Cold War-era educational film designed to prepare American children for nuclear attack. “This visual relic of anxiety links the domestic and the geopolitical, suggesting that the desire for safety at home is inseparable from broader structures of control and fear,” Favero explains.
Other works in this thought-provoking show include Momenti Mori, a collages piece that reimagines Holbein’s Dance of Death using the only publications that still reached the artist by post during the COVID lockdown —real estate promotional magazines— which “places the spectre of death amidst the domestic fantasies of luxury living,” and “promises immortality through property.”
This also serves as a sharp social critique of Malta’s overheated real estate market and the deeper inequalities it mirrors, Favero notes. In a further work Favero’s focus on Malta today, shows an altered atlas, punctured, carved and undone.
There’s more ghostly cartography, in Alto Mare, with which Favaro confronts the central ‘contradiction of our time’: that while environmental threats demand collective responsibility and global cooperation, states remain obsessed with safeguarding their territory and the paradox that nations as strengthen their boundaries, the rising sea threatens to wash over them all.
And so, Protect Me, is a stark reminder of the state of the world. Presenting contemporary political paradoxes and the futility of hope without action, this quiet yet thought-provoking exhibition on a small island is deeply political on a global level. As countries around the world embrace protectionism for the sake of their economies, are we forgetting to protect what matters most?
