is the visual of the 13th edition of Taobuk SeeSicily, which from 15 to 19 June will unravel the concept of “freedom”. A burning theme that the artist wanted to synthesise in an image imbued with high semantic value: man and the will to reach for the sky as a metaphor for an instinct. A mythological character, Icarus, had dared to challenge the gods by building wax wings that melted miserably close to the sun. A yearning that never died, with so many projects conceived by ingenious minds remaining on paper until 19 September 1783, the day the first balloon soared over Versailles.
A hot air balloon soaring upwards: the visual for Taobuk 2023 created by artist Velasco Vitali
A hot air balloon soaring upwards: the visual for Taobuk 2023 created by artist Velasco Vitali
‘Aria is the musical air, a detachment from the earth,’ Velasco Vitali explains. ‘The hot air balloon is the first flying project, still existing and practised today. A metaphor for freedom and an invitation to look at the world from above. I imagined this design for Taobuk 2023 as a flying machine with perfect geometry, the simplest built by man, bordering on abstraction, colours that encompass the entire range of our desires for freedom, starting with the yellow background, a sky flooded with dazzling Mediterranean sunlight that invites us to shuffle colours and flags. Tightly sewn fabrics, a basket, warm air and ballasts to be dropped in one’s path, only in this way can a flight, an adventure, begin. It is also the most obvious symbolic representation of detachment from the ground and is connected to an innate desire to fly, the only real action capable of contradicting our natural dimension of anchoring ourselves to the ground. The image connected to the idea of the aero-static journey is an invitation to slowly detach ourselves from the ground, towards a freedom with a story to tell that will only reveal itself during ascent, when we will discover that our real interest is not in the infinite space of the sky, but in the earth, seen from another point of view, perceived as a vast territory free of the boundaries we have assigned to it. It is the expansion of the concept of freedom that is amplified with increasing distance from the ground. Duchamp enclosed the air of Paris in a glass ampoule, perhaps with the precise intention of materialising what is impregnable and trying to transform the air into a work of art, as if the freest of thoughts could be anchored to reality and delivered packaged within everyone’s reach, ready to be reopened when needed to satisfy a desire for flight and freedom. Like a music, an air’.
In José Saramago’s Memorial do convento, Father Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a victim of the Inquisition, wants to build, mixing science and mysticism, a balloon “made of sun, shadow, closed clouds, magnets and iron sheets” to achieve freedom.
Father Bartolomeu is a real-life personage who was nicknamed the ‘flyer’ precisely because at the beginning of the 18th century (a few decades before the Montgolfier brothers) he succeeded in getting some medium-sized aerostats lifted off the ground.