Open studio. Più penetrante di un cristallo di radio
In conjunction with the 2018 Fotografia Europea festival—“Revolutions: Upheavals, Changes, Utopias”—and parallel to the opening of the Lutz & Guggisberg exhibition il giardino at Collezione Maramotti, Atelier dell’Errore BIG opens its studio to the public for the second time, in an event titled Più penetrante di un cristallo di radio.
On the third floor of the Collezione venue, at the center of an almost labyrinthine display presenting many different works from recent years, visitors will find a workshop containing the Atelier’s latest advanced-stage projects, inspired by the revolutionary figure of Marie Curie. These two huge, archetypal, entomological “graphitographs,” shown to the public for the first time, suggest that a poetic gaze can transform the fragile graphite of an ordinary pencil into an element that irradiates everything in its path, “penetrating deeper than a radium crystal.”
Just like radioactive elements, the young people at the Atelier dell’Errore tend to be invisible, yet are possessed of amazing power, an intense force channeled into extraordinary creativity; they also have the ability to penetrate the surface of things and—as boldly as the world’s greatest scientists—imagine the unimaginable. Like gamma rays, the Atelier participants are “materials” that must be handled with care, and the radiation they give off can be detected and revealed only by a special device: art.
The imagery of the Atelier dell’Errore artists swarms with ancestral animals, organisms that elude any traditional scientific classification, and induces a change in perspective: by reinventing zoology as we know it, the Atelier creatures become paradigms and protagonists of a new, possible reality. These animals unquestionably embody the fears and conflicts of the young people who have drawn them, but above all, their need for protection and hunger for self-assertion. Humming with a visionary, revolutionary power, the works that come out of the Atelier show how its participants require reassurance and support in order to achieve the self-confidence and self-esteem that will allow them to interact fruitfully with other people.
The ground rules at the Atelier are few, but clear: nothing is ever to be erased—because mistakes must be valued—and animals are the only subject depicted.
The Atelier drawings are often collaborative works, giving rise to a collective artistic, relational experience—a sort of “social sculpture.
