Open studio. AdE Identikit 01
Atelier dell'Errore
In conjunction with the 2019 Fotografia Europea festival – titled “Bonding. Intimacy, Relationships, New Worlds” – and parallel to the opening of Margherita Moscardini’s The Fountains of Za’atari at Collezione Maramotti and Parco Cervi in Reggio Emilia, Atelier dell’Errore BIG will be reopening its studio and exhibition space at Collezione Maramotti to the public.
The stated theme of the festival seems like an apt description of the Atelier dell’Errore itself. This visual arts workshop, designed for young people in neuropsychiatric care, is a form of “social sculpture” in which drawing, performance, photography and video become a shared experience that engenders other worlds, worlds of otherness: rooted in everyday life, yet brimming with fantastical visions and imagery. The only subjects portrayed are animals, nothing is ever erased, and mistakes are thought of something to be valued.
AdE Identikit 01 is a composite self-portrait of the Atelier; through photographs and video, it explores the creative process at the studio where these young people have been working for almost four years now.
Forging a dialogue with the works themselves – the participants’ powerfully imaginative drawings, inhabited by creatures that seem both menacing and protective – a video projection and twelve large-scale photographs (tools employed here for the first time in the AdE’s long-time history) offer glimpses of life at the Atelier, of the stories woven within it, and of the relationships between the young artists who share the intimate, explosive experience of art-making.
The photographs in the show, taken by the Atelier’s founder and artistic director Luca Santiago Mora, are drawn from three separate series (seen here for the first time) that focus on different facets of the Atelier: Cover, Black Dürer and The Bird.
Cover documents key moments from the last few years of the workshop, capturing iconic images and highlighting the physicality of the young artists.
Black Dürer, through a series of almost abstract, metaphysical shots where the image is a reflected one, describes the young people’s relationship to works of art – in this case, a piece by Claudio Parmiggiani that is in the permanent exhibition at Collezione Maramotti.
The Bird depicts the moment of transformation, hybridization, reinvention and fluid self-expression that can be found in performance, as an everyday act of redemption.
Exploring the performative realm is nothing new for the Atelier dell’Errore. Since 2017, it has presented various incarnations of the staged reading Piccola Liturgia Errante in locations around Italy, including Ravenna for Teatro delle Albe, Turin for Torino Spiritualità, and the Milan Triennale’s Teatro dell’Arte. At the end of April 2019, the kids from the Atelier will appear in a performance at Arte Sella, in collaboration with Mario Brunello.
For the special open studio on Sunday 14 April, Atelier dell’Errore BIG SCS and association Atelier dell’Errore ONLUS will present the performance Da vicino nessuno è un disegno [Up Close, Nobody’s a Drawing], whose title pays homage to “Da vicino nessuno è normale” (Up close, nobody’s normal) by Franco Basaglia, a pioneering figure who led the reform of Italian mental health services. This “regulated improvisation” is based on details from three drawings, photographically enlarged into seemingly shapeless, meaningless marks; these are used as a point of departure for mapping out other possible paths of development that the definitive drawings never took.
The latent potentialities of the drawings, activated by the visionary narrative energy of the Atelier participants, shed light on realms that everyone may look at but few know how to see, showing how the essence of artistic practice is the capacity for vision: a skill more poetic than technical.