Extra Ordinario Workshop - Interni Magazine

Ninety artists from Atelier F return to revive the spaces of the Antares del Vega pavilion in Marghera. Waiting for the open day, the first edition of the workshop, born as a creative synergy in the difficulties of the first lockdown, is told in a documentary and in a photo book

The second edition of the Extra Ordinario Workshop promoted by Vulcano Agency is underway: started on 5 July, it will animate the spaces of the Antares Pavilion at Vega in Marghera Venice until 30 September 2021.

The new edition sees again the participation of about ninety artists, students and already established artists, at work for over two months. At the conclusion of the workshop, the pavilion will open its doors for an open day that will collect the results of this new experience of creative investigation. Curators, gallery owners, collectors, collaborators and clients of the Vulcano network are invited to participate with targeted studio visits.

A renewed experience that of the Extra Ordinary Workshop, which highlights how the project was not an impromptu episode, but part of a precise vision of Vulcano that focuses on the comparison between the company's approaches and the creative imaginaries of the artists.

The Extra Ordinary project was born in the months following the first lockdown of 2020, from the collaboration between Vulcano and ninety young artists from Atelier F, many of them students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, in the spaces of the Antares pavilion at the Vega – Venice Marghera Science and Technology Park.

Extra Ordinario is therefore the story of a shared space: an unconventional project born in an out of the ordinary condition. A response to the condition of isolation and the inability of artists to work in the emergency period. An opportunity – a synergy – which therefore arises from difficulty. A meeting point – concrete, productive and wide-ranging – between reality that is only apparently the opposite: the corporate one and that of the world of art.

On the one hand there is Vulcano, an agency that has always collaborated with artists (Adrian Paci, Regina José Galindo, Tomás Saraceno, Igor Grubić, Giuseppe Stampone, and Francesco Vezzoli, among others), which has decided to strengthen the bond with the creative community of the territory; on the other hand, there are the artists of Atelier F invited to contaminate the Antares space with their work, their ideas and their style. At the center is the dialogue – constant – aimed at the exchange between the parties.

The first experience of Extra Ordinario gave life to the Extra Ordinary Mixtape photographic volume and to a documentary film, both produced by Vulcano Agency.

Made with photographs by Nico Covre, the book is structured as a narrative composed of many visual fragments, part of the extensive documentation. The images are recombined and associated freely, without following the chronological order and with a montage that goes beyond the need for a realistic exposure. Thus was born a story that refers to the logic of the mixtape. The book is also accompanied by a conversation between Daniele Capra, Carlo Di Raco and Paolo Pretolani.