STILL LIFE
2025 Alberto Favaro
Installation:
furniture, custom plastic slipcovers.
Short Description
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.
In Still Life, this gesture radicalized, extending the act of preservation to an obsessive degree. Every surface is shielded, to the point of rendering objects dysfunctional—
television images are barely visible, teacups cannot be used.
Protection becomes a barrier, a paradox that questions the desire to control the passing of time and the inevitability of decay. It is only in this claustrophobic stillness that the deeper impulse of the work emerges: not protection from wear, but from time itself.
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. Yet the act of preserving also becomes isolating: how much of ourselves do we lose when we attempt to remain untouched?
Only the 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.
The installation STILL LIFE has been shown in Alberto Favaro's solo exhibition -PROTECT ME- at Muza (National Museum of Art), Valletta 2025.