as part of Oltre le mura / Beyond the walls
a Fabbrica Europa project for Autunno Fiorentino 2026

PROVENANCE AND FRAYING IN THE ARTS
Luca Farulli, Professor of Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence

Artistic genres, in their evolving historical development, can be understood in terms of provenance, which is multiple and hybrid. Painting and theatre, for example, both stem from the desire to give form to social and human life. Theatre thus moves within the fabric of painting, just as painting moves within theatre; both emerge from, and are shaped by, social life, which manifests itself in the city as public square.
Art, therefore, has a provenance rather than an origin: it does not derive from an original principle from which it necessarily follows. It is precisely this aspect that restores to art the open-ended dynamism and fluidity through which it takes shape: through integrations, exclusions and constellations.
Consequently, genres are established through borrowing and transformation, through substitution. They emerge through difference and are in no way organic.
The interwoven patterns of genres and media constitute active elements through which the artist’s technological imagination operates — consciously and purposefully — to open up boundaries and dismantle demarcations that would otherwise confine a genre’s potential within a closed sphere of competence and exclusivity.
Examples include photography opening up painting in the work of Francis Bacon; William Turner’s use of etching to open up the possibilities of painting; music opening up experimental photography at the Bauhaus through László Moholy-Nagy; and sound opening up video in video art.
In this sense, speaking of interweaving threads in motion means highlighting the fact that individual art forms are inherently intermedial and hybrid; and that art always emerges from what is not art — life, labour, ritual — a provenance that remains, in the form of an interwoven thread, permanently attached to art itself, inseparable from it and impossible to remove from its very body.

AUTHENTIC COPIES? CHINOISERIE, SHANZHAI AND THE MYTH OF ORIGINALITY
Fabrizio Massini, theatre producer and sinologist at the University of Vienna, curator of the WAX – Trame in movimento project

Over the past two decades, as successive economic and social crises eroded the promises of free movement of people and knowledge that emerged in the early 2000s, the rhetoric of identity-based nationalism has steadily permeated political and media discourse — increasingly constraining the ways we think about and imagine art and culture.
These narratives of cultural purity, intent on constructing separate histories of art impervious to mutual influences, obscure a historical reality shaped by processes of hybridization and cultural interweaving.
This lecture examines notions of originality and authenticity in art from a comparative perspective, focusing on the performance practice of choreographer Er Gao and his most recent project, WAX – Trame in movimento: a work that, by ironically playing with the association between “Made in China” and counterfeit, challenges conventional distinctions between original and copy, questioning how authenticity is defined as well as valued.

OLTRE LE MURA | Beyond the Walls is a project by Fondazione Fabbrica Europa as part of Autunno Fiorentino 2026.