L’arte e la poesia di Velasco Vitali costruiscono ponti con «Sabìr» (English version)

It is as if the waves of the sea, that sea which both divides and unites East and West, had overflowed into Arte Sella, the art park in Borgo Valsugana, Trentino, dragging with them (after all, it is still a dream) six thousand larch wood shingles (typical elements of alpine building coverings) painted in the colors of Mediterranean ceramics. These shingles are used to construct a semicircular structure that evokes the domes which were—and still are—among the most widespread architectural forms in the Mediterranean region, a recognizable hallmark of many capitals and ports in Europe. A site-specific installation conceived for the park, it recalls the deep bond represented by the Mediterranean Sea between East and West.

In the 38th year since its foundation, Arte Sella (born experimentally in 1986, when a group of friends from Borgo Valsugana gathered in Val di Sella, in the garden of Villa Strobele, imagining the fusion of contemporary art and nature) will inaugurate Sabir, a new installation conceived by Velasco Vitali (Bellano, Como, 1969), expressly for Arte Sella, this Saturday, August 31, at 3 PM. Arte Sella’s projects have always followed a very specific set of rules: the artist is not the absolute protagonist of the artwork but accepts that nature completes the work; nature is to be defended as a repository of memory; nature is not only protected but interpreted; works are constructed using primarily natural materials; installations emerge from the landscape only to become part of it.

"The project," explains Vitali, "was born two years ago, before COVID, from a request by Arte Sella's then-director and founder, Emanuele Montibeller, and its current director, Giacomo Bianchi."

Sabir takes its name from the language of corsairs and refers to the lingua franca that served as a verbal bridge among sailors in Mediterranean ports, from East to West. Vitali’s dome rises from a dune of salt, in a setting of fir trees and rocky layers, transforming into a kind of cultural bridge between East and West, between the past and modernity. "Working at Arte Sella," Vitali adds, "means attuning oneself to a place of distinct natural beauty, which at the same time opens itself to new meanings and realities. Shifting the gaze from these mountains, the wood can evoke a boat, navigation, the entire Mediterranean. Neither the Aeneid nor the Odyssey have anything to do with these mountains, yet all of Western civilization has been nourished by a centuries-old culture originating from the East, from Greece to Asia Minor."

"For me, the Mediterranean is thus a crucial reference, perfectly synthesized in the shared architectural form of Islamic and Christian domes. That’s why I imagined the sea rising powerfully in the heart of the Alps, dragging the dome with it, only to recede and leave behind a trace in the form of a white salt stain."

Vitali’s new project (Sabir, which he sees as a continuation of Branco, created in 2021 for the bunker courtroom of the Ucciardone prison in Palermo) began with a request for access to the boat cemetery in Lampedusa, via the Agrigento tribunal and the Customs Agency.

Once permission was granted, the artist connected with a project launched by the founders of the Casa dello Spirito (presided over by Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori) and inmates from the Opera prison: "Thus, from a simple piece of wood," Velasco recounts, "Sabir was born—a dome that seeks to bring together the contemporary and mythical Mediterranean, reconciling the contradictions between an idealized antiquity and a present too often steeped in the tragedy of migrants who die in that same cradle that was once the origin of Western civilization."

Among the six thousand painted shingles covering Sabir, the artist inserted twenty anomalous, neutral ones made of wood taken from a boat recovered in 2013 on the shores of Lampedusa. These twenty planks "tell an ancient memory, a glorious past, but at the same time a sad and bitter present."