Installation, 2008

Caro Fumante is a collaborative work where volunteers gave me their cigarette butts to help building the stinkiest piece of art (probably since Manzoni’s artist’s shit?), known by me.
Little by little my smoker friends and loved ones helped me as not volunteers while having their cigarettes and lighters stolen during a period of many years so they could not smoke while I was around (at least not so much since I would steal only one cigarette at time). The fruit of my labor is presented as evidences of a crime. One that I don’t regret.

The works are named as numbers. The numbers of minutes of my friends didn’t smoke. The numbers of times the stolen lighters did not lit, the number of cigarettes a average smoker consumes during a year period and so on.

To find out the number of times a lighter can lit versus the total amount of gas in it this exercise was needed. According to the experiment this lighter worked 4332 times until empty. The final count served to establish a factor to calculate the number of times each of the stolen lighters avoid working after their capture.