Her theme is the invasion of that child of large-scale industry: the big town. Her perspective, too, relates to India in a very particular way, for she was born in Corsica and grew up in the `red' suburbs of Paris. As such, she can understand the alienation of the rural person thrust into the lower end of an exploitative society and also their star-struck attitude to the elements of mass-produced culture, with its expression rooted in graffiti, mail-art, the cinema poster and performance art. Ideally, this form of expression is transitory, for once it wears off, an exploitative society must quickly search for newalternatives to replace it. It needs deeper concerns to underpin it.

Using this spontaneous source, Savelli delves deeper into the human condition, starting out as an animator with troubled children, and later with the feminine creativity, which brought her to India in 1984. The elements that stand out in her work are the attempt of so-called ``free'' societies to force their thinking on anyone and everyone; the break this makes in the mind of the artist in relation to his aesthetic sense of the past and the ``repair-job'' he does to reassert the continuity of humanity even in inhuman conditions. Savelli has chosen a particularly apt genre for this ``repair-job'', the collage, which is really a patch-up of images or elements over time, performing both the task of repairing the old and creating the new at one go.

--Suneet Chopra