“Non si accettano caramelle dagli sconosciuti”
("Don't take candy from strangers")
Performance / Happening and modeled surfaces

“Non si accettano caramelle dagli sconosciuti” ("Don't take candy from strangers")

The project was exhibited at MACRO Asilo – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome in 2019.

“Non si accettano caramelle dagli sconosciuti” ("Don't take candy from strangers") is presented as a happening that involves direct audience participation — continuing Eleonora Gugliotta’s ongoing exploration of personal experience and intimacy as material for artistic interaction.
The project seeks to challenge and reframe the way we perceive everyday objects and human behavior.

In this case, visitors are offered chewing gum. This marks the first “break of preconception,” as they knowingly disregard the provocative warning contained in the project’s title itself. A second rupture follows when the chewing gum, once chewed, becomes the medium through which the audience actively takes part in the artwork — by shaping it and sticking it beneath school chairs, recalling the childish gesture of leaving one’s gum behind as a trace of passage in a specific place and moment.

This act, though seemingly playful, reaffirms the artist’s intention to use art as a means of breaking the mental and physical barriers that distance us from our most instinctive and spontaneous nature.
It is within that primal, untamed part of ourselves — the one tied to our animal essence — that, according to Gugliotta, lie both the causes and the possible resolutions of every human conflict.