Superfetazione a camme, 2003

This is the second version of Superfetazione a camme, created two years after the 2001 version for the Ridotto at the Teatro Manzoni in Monza (steel, wood and medium cadmium yellow acrylic). It has exactly the same dimensions, 180 × 125 × 120 cm, but a completely different mix of materials – wood and rubber instead of steel and acrylic – and, above all, an exhibition context that radically alters the meaning of the work.

The 2001 version was conceived as a parasitic intervention on a real, pre-existing architectural element: one of the load-bearing pillars of the theatre’s mezzanine, built in the 1950s, to which the mechanical cam clung as a retrofitted addition, a superfetation in the most literal sense of the term. The pillar was a given, historical and structural; the artist merely colonised it with his own mechanism. But a private gallery such as Stefano Fumagalli’s in Bergamo, or an exhibition space such as the one in Ciampino, do not offer the same kind of architectural element to ‘attack’: the host is missing – the historic pillar onto which to graft the parasite.

Cavenago solves the problem by reconstructing the entire apparatus from scratch, no longer as an intervention on existing architecture, but as an autonomous and transportable object: here, wood takes on the role previously played by the theatre’s actual pillar, acting as a load-bearing structure built from scratch by the artist himself, whilst rubber replaces steel and acrylic in the construction of the cam itself, the eccentric mechanism which, driven by visitors to the exhibition, transforms rotational motion into oscillation.

It is a conceptually significant shift: from a site-specific work, which depended for its very existence on a real historical architecture to be ‘colonised’, to a portable work, capable of independently recreating both the support and the parasite that inhabits it, both the host and the organism that has settled upon it. Rubber, a softer material more immediately associated with the industrial world of gaskets and shock absorbers, also gives the cam a texture that is pleasant to the touch, distinct from the cold, polished feel of steel, perhaps better suited to an object that must now stand on its own, without the support of a historic wall to cling to.

When viewed together, the two versions demonstrate once again how, for Cavenago, the concept precedes and outlives its first material incarnation: the very idea of mechanical superfetation, which originated as a critical intervention on a real architectural structure, is here reformulated as an independent sculptural object, capable of carrying with it, wherever it is exhibited, both the support that ought to remain fixed and the mechanism that betrays it.