L'amicizia (Friendship)

Eternity project stems from an idea by Maurizio Cattelan, developed in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara on the occasion of his appointment as Honorary Professor. During the official ceremony, the artist involved the students in the creation of works dedicated to the theme of death, inviting them to reflect on the rituals and symbolic devices associated with the end of life. The result was a wide repertoire of funerary objects — gravestones, tomb plaques, tombstones and printed obituaries — each bearing the name of an artist from the past or present, accompanied by their dates of birth and death, sometimes hypothetical for artists still alive.

These works together formed a large performance installation set up in the gardens of the Accademia di Carrara. Within this context is L'amicizia (Friendship), a work that explores one of the central themes of Cattelan's poetics: death as a tool for questioning the meaning of life, expressed through the language of black humour. The work consists of a tombstone dedicated to Maurizio Cattelan himself, flanked by a dog — also present in the post-produced photographic documentation — which, in a deliberately irreverent gesture, repeatedly defecates on the ground where the artist lies. The epitaph reinforces the ironic tone of the work: «The greatest pain was leaving my dear and faithful friend.» The animal, reminiscent of Cattelan's famous taxidermy works, is made of papier-mâché and synthetic fur; the excrement is made of patinated plaster, while the gravestone is made of sandstone. Friendship was selected from among the twenty works awarded by Maurizio Cattelan himself.