PROTECT ME
2025 Alberto Favaro
Installation:
Wood frames, printed fabric cushions, metal staples
Short Description
This eponymous work lends its title to the entire solo exhibition that took place at MUZA, Valletta in 2025.
Protect Me draws from a familiar, intimate tradition: printed, often padded textile panels once commonly found in Maltese homes of the 1970s and 1980s. These comforting images are reworked, introducing sharp metal staples that pierce and compress the fabric, distorting its 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’s), ornament is transformed into a form of domination, or perhaps care laced with control.
The work explores the ambiguity of protection: 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.
The work probes the fine line between protection and domination. To care for another implies a degree of control. That control, whether voluntary or imposed, often betrays asymmetries in power. In this sense, the act of protection becomes a double bind: both caregiver and cared-for are caught in a relationship of mutual dependency—one that can comfort, but also confine.
Work displayed at Alberto Favaro's solo exhibition -PROTECT ME- at Muza (National Museum of Art), Valletta 2025.