Vela d’Artista

In conjunction with the opening of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, on April 17 2024, Edipo Re inaugurates the second edition of the project Vela d’Artista in Venice, with the site-specific work AdE_Vela_Rapido by Atelier dell'Errore (AdE), an artist collective dedicated to visual arts and performance.

The project Vela d'Artista involves the design and creation of a sail for Edipo Re, a vessel dear to Pier Paolo Pasolini, by contemporary artists whose work touches upon values such as environmental sustainability and social inclusion. For the project’s second edition Atelier dell'Errore proposes AdE_Vela_Rapido, a randa sail 10 meters high and 5 meters wide.

During the preview days of the Biennale, 17- 21 April 2024, Atelier dell’Errore’s work will remain moored on the banks of the San Marco basin to welcome visitors daily from 12 to 5 pm. Thereafter, the vessel will become a traveling pavilion in the heart of the Venetian Lagoon throughout the spring and summer of 2024. Subsequently, between the end of August and the beginning of September, Edipo Re will dock on the Lido for the Venice Film Festival.

The unique feature of AdE’s sail for Edipo Re is the collective’s physical graphic work that, thanks to the complex technical collaboration with an international sailmaker, becomes embedded within the sail itself. AdE’s drawing is not a serigraph print, but the sail’s interior structure, its architectural “soul.”

For the support of their drawing, the collective chose a highly symbolic object: 50 isothermal rescue blankets joined together to form two enormous silver and gold backdrops. Here, AdE transforms a generic material normally employed to protect fragility into a functional sail, while also creating a suggestion of hope - a new possible future.

The subject chosen by AdE to encamp and animate its sail is a two-faced creature (one face on each of its sides) with a multi-faceted body composed of orifices and apertures, linked together by a highly detailed tendon tissue. These elements allude to containment, preservation or conservation, taking the form of a vascular body. What might be hidden within this constellation of organic vessels is entirely open to interpretation.

The Vela d’Artista project is curated and coordinated by Sibylle Righetti, general director of Edipo Re, with the collaboration of Silvia Jop, artistic director of Edipo Re.

The sail was designed and produced thanks to the collaboration with Velman Sails and with the generous support of Collezione Maramotti.

The Vela d'Artista project is made possible with the support of Gianni Belletti.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Genesis and concept of the artwork AdE_Vela_Rapido by Atelier Dell’Errore

Edipo Re was born as a commercial net (or in Italian, Rapido) fishing boat in the Pula shipyards in 1943. At the end of WWII, it was transformed into a literal salvation vessel for Istrain Italians desperately escaping the Iron Curtain. It is precisely this second life of Edipo Re, from the fishing of sea life to the salvation of human life, which inspired the collective to design a sail that stands both as a symbol of hope and allegory for the contemporary tragedy of forced migrations and diaspora.

The use of gold here represents a continuum in what AdE’s founder Luca Santiago Mora describes as the collective’s “Golden Age,” which first began in 2016 for a solo exhibition at Moretti Gallery in London, where AdE lined the gallery’s window with the same type of gold foil blankets as the backdrop for a video work.

In more recent works, AdE uses gold to create the figures of their “beyond- zoological” creatures. However, for AdE_Vela_Rapido the collective returns gold to its most traditional use, as pure background. Much like the abysmal flatness of a byzantine icon, AdE suggests a similar desire to communicate that which is elsewhere, a foreign, ex-static dimension.