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We have always loved to stay in Basel thanks to the warm welcome and devotion of our friend and gallery owner Helga Friese.
Our memories of several carnavals; days and nights following little groups of musiciens, eating ‘flour soup’ in the early hours, resulted in a highly appriated exhibition by the people form Basel who proudly and enviously preserved their carnaval.
Indeed, Guidi did succeed to genuinly represent this carnaval without becoming picturesque. This feast that remained faithful to it’s origin, dignified and sometimes even tragic, so different from the ostentation and overrated quality of the Carnaval of Venice nowadays.
Every year, day and night the fives and drums literally drugged us and returning to France we felt groggy from withdrawal symptoms.
The ‘Fassnacht’ is not a carnaval for tourists, one has to be an ‘insider’, and every time in the streets, exhausted but happy, or in their cosy pubs we felt the priviledge of living it from the inside.
Two Punchinellos
