Arte Sella, a new work arrives: it's Sabir by Velasco Vitali

On August 31, 2024, Arte Sella presents Sabìr, an installation conceived by artist Velasco Vitali for the Borgo Valsugana art park in Trentino. A new work of art thus joins the many already present in the Trentino contemporary art park. Sabìr was the language of privateers, a lingua franca spoken by sailors among themselves in Mediterranean ports, from East to West. The artist chose it as the title for his work, which, with its semicircular structure, cites the domes that are still one of the most common architectural forms in the Mediterranean area, which have been embellished with colored majolica tiles since the 15th century.

Vitali’s dome emerges from a salt dune against a backdrop of fir trees and rock strata-a form that is a cultural bridge between East and West, past and modernity. Among the 6,000 painted larch shingles that cover Sabìr (shingles are the typical shingles of alpine roofs), the artist has included 20 lumber shingles, anomalous and neutral, taken from a barge, found in 2013 on the shores of Lampedusa. The abandoned shipwreck provided, thanks to the efforts of the Casa dello Spirito Foundation and the inmates of the Opera prison, the 20 laths incorporated in the work: a symbol that evokes an ancient memory and a glorious past, but at the same time a sad and bitter contemporaneity.

Sabìr’s installation began on the Day of Remembrance and Welcoming, October 3, 2023, exactly ten years after the tragic shipwreck in 2013; the artist and his collaborators chose part of the installation’s vast “sea surface” to remember the 20 missing of that day, who remained faceless, nameless and without identity.

Arte Sella, a new work arrives: it's Sabir by Velasco Vitali

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