AdE_Vela_Rapido, Edipo Re, Venice

AdE_Vela_Rapido by Atelier dell’Errore for Edipo Re

 AdE_Vela_Rapido by Atelier dell’Errore for Edipo Re 

AdE_Vela_Rapido, 2024
Artist’s Sail with double sided original drawing encased in protective transparent layer.
Drawings rendered in transparent acrylics and black permanent marker on polyester isothermal rescue blankets
Boom: 5 meters, Luff: 10 meters   Leech: 11.7 meters

Vela D’Artista - Second Edition

17 - 21 April 2024, 12 - 5pm

Giardinetti Reali, San Marco 2, Venice 30124

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In conjunction with the opening of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, on April 17, 2024 Atelier dell'Errore (AdE) presents AdE_Vela_Rapido for the Second Edition of the Vela d’Artista  project organized by Edipo Re. 

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. For the project’s second edition Atelier dell'Errore proposes AdE_Vela_Rapido, a randa sail 10 meters high and 5 meters wide. 

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 a leading sailmaker, becomes embedded within the sail itself. AdE’s drawing becomes 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.

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.

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