Atelier dell’Errore | Open studio
In the 6-to-7 May weekend, during the Festival of European Photography in Reggio Emilia and alongside the opening of the project It starts with the firing by Elisabetta Benassi at Collezione Maramotti, for the first time the studio of the Atelier dell’Errore BIG will be open to visitors. The Atelier dell'Errore BIG is a group of young people over 18 who meet every week at Collezione Maramotti to draw together. In recent months the Atelier has seen an increase in participants and is making new works, some of which will be visible in their space.
Besides a selection of drawings illustrating the young artists’ production – works on a white background, mostly irregular in shape, housed in wooden boxes – the exhibition includes the more recent works on a “black background” – presented in a London exhibition in 2016 in a dialogue with artworks from old painting traditions – showing an interpretation of the capital sins from an entomological point of view. In one of the rooms a screening will be held of the photographic documentation of the Atelier’s latest productions, where the close-up viewing of the lines and drawings turns into an abstract suggestion, offering a possible interpretation course and a journey inside the creating process behind these drawings.
The expressive imagery of Atelier dell’Errore’s young artists is focused on the depiction of animals as ancestral figures, living organisms lying outside any traditional order of scientific classification. The Atelier animals certainly embody the fears and defeats of those who drew them, but more so their needs for protection and their powerful aspiration to emancipation. The works, infused of visionary energy, spring out of their needs for support and reassurance in the struggle to gain self-esteem, and the progression towards a fruitful network of relations.
Born as a complementary arm of the clinical activity of children’s neuropsychiatry department of Reggio Emilia and Bergamo, Atelier del’Errore is a visual art workshop with which Collezione Maramotti started a collaboration in 2015; the Collection has in fact assigned a working space to this project in its premises and has participated, together with Max Mara, in the organisation of two Atelier's exhibitions (Uomini come cibo/Humans as Food, Milan, 2015; The Guardian Animals + other invisible beings, Moretti Gallery, London, 2016) and a conversation about its activity (Italian Cultural Institute, London, 2016). This collaboration has contributed to the idea of a book, published in 2016, edited by Marco Belpoliti: Atlante di zoologia profetica/Prophetic zoological Atlas. From January 2017 the Atelier dell’Errore BIG project is also supported by Fondazione Alta Mane Italia.