Agata Ferrari Bravo has the wild spirit of the wayfarer. The stories she tells through her objects lap up a dark surrealism, at times pervaded by a subtle eroticism that reverberates in burlesque, but without ever adhering to any status, rather merging her own language by bringing to the surface its primordial, symbolic, ancestral truth. At times the carnivalesque dimension leads us towards the darker side of the circus, a Babel, a grotesque circle, a free zone, the eternal home of freaks, a land where everything is subversion. Her travels in search of objects linked to various iconographies with a gypsy-nomadic flavor, which the artist accumulates and recomposes in the form of collages bear witness to this. Their meanings are never obvious and always the result of decantation and slippage, recomposed according to her aesthetic code that highlights a nostalgia for her origins, accentuating her obsession with the authentic. Indeed, in the artist’s research, one can sense a strong proximity to the world of folklore. Some of her masks are reminiscent of Baba Yaga, the legendary creature from Slavic mythology, one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures on the European mythological scene, whose origin dates back to the proto-historical age. It is a character who presides over magical rituals often with initiatory functions. The proximity to the folkloric dimension can also be explained in the reading of the fetish in an ethnological key; where in ethnology, fetishism is defined as a form of religiosity involving the adoration of objects believed to be imbued with supernatural powers. The theme of death and its iconography is often present in Agata’s work, but it too is subverted by the artist’s ironic and vitalistic impetus: crucifixes, churches, funerals, as well as funeral rituals draw on slavishly sunny colors, and are recomposed in the form of refined aesthetics guided by a pure, playful and joyful gaze on the world.