On one of the hottest fridays this summer, a 45 minute speedboat drive dropped me and a group of Italian businessmen off on the coast of one of Favignana’s best restaurants. With me being late to the party as usual, the event had already started, but we were nevertheless personally greeted by Picnic Affair’s founder Jacopo Pizzicannella.
Picnic Affair, a triannual boutique celebration of music, arts, and joie de vivre started as Pizzicannella’s birthday party in 2019 with a small themed gathering in a Tuscan farmhouse and has since grown into a very well organised experimental event that has hosted circa 400 guests in it’s 6th edition. This time Picnic Affair welcomed its mostly regular guests to Favignana, a small island off the west coast of Sicily known for its tuna hunting and white tuff mining traditions that span back to Roman times. While the previous editions of Picnic Affair focused solely on music, this time Pizzicannella invited Maria Abramenko to curate the weekend’s fine art programme. The London based Abramenko previously curated the Palermo Art Weekend and some parts of Manifesta 12, making her the perfect choice for another project in the region.
The evening started with a performance by Emiliano Maggi, a Rome-based artist whose practice broadly spans between sculpture and performance, music and dance. He combines the mythological and the ethnographic with the surrealist scenes of Italian 70’s television. Maggi presented the island public with an electric guitar made out of a tree log found in the Tuscan countryside. The instrument, carved out of old wood following the tradition of mediaeval or even pre mediaeval ideas on music, sounds nothing like a Fender, Gibson or Ibanez, but more like a psychedelic representation of an island nymph’s love call. The performance evolved into a mixture of vocals, guitar chords and dance, all done by Maggi alone, wearing a specially produced costume with his face painted midnight blue. The piece evolved from a 2015 work entitled ‘The Nymphs Orchestra’, in which Maggi performed on a much larger log surrounded by the ruins of the ancient city of Cosa as well as in Rome’s Church of Santa Rita. Maggi, hosted in the halls where boats and tools for tuna hunting used to be stored, opened the event in a hypnotic manner, beginning the much promoted transcendental experience of the ‘Trans-Romantic Republic’, a neologism coined specially for this occasion by Pizzicannella.
At around eleven in the evening, the crowd started moving to Favignana Mangia’s Resort, where most of the guests were lodged. The party continued until early morning – a true veteran raver’s paradise. The second day of the event conveniently started with a guided yoga class by the sea – the resort’s stony beach is beautifully covered with patches of wooden verandas and plateaus. After a morning swim in the sea on one of the beaches on the other side of the island and lunch with some local delicacies – the previous night I already made some friends who gladly took me around – I joined the crowd by the pool and lied down in the sun with an espresso martini by my side. In the afternoon, guests were offered a stylist and a large selection of clothes, accessories and makeup in order to prepare for the theme of the evening party. I was a little confused when I saw the room filled with random pieces of clothing, rope, net, and glitter. The masqued crowd flamboyantly varied from Mad Max to Cast Away, forming some sort of an Italian island version of Burning Man.