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Art and ice – around the world sculpting the... snow
English vesion by Barbara Bonfadini
From snowmen to real snow sculptures to leave a mark and know the people of the world. When they were children, Luca Bonetti, Gianmario Bonfadini, Nadia Braito and Manuela Zecca, All young people from 30 to 40 years from Sondrio and province, have learned to build snowmen of every shape and size with relatives and friends. Today they go around the world to make snow sculptures inspired by the desire to meet and to deal with people of different nationalities, by the pleasure of travelling and knowing, united by the desire to experience their own inspiration or their artistic skills. VALTELLINA team was born from all these reasons and this year in January it has participated in international competitions of snow and ice in Colorado and Trentino Alto Adige.
"The first experiment in this sense," explains Luca Bonetti, manager of a cooperative of services in the field of cultural assets – I did this with Gianmario and Manuela in the 2000 Art in ice edition ", in Livigno.
We went blindly, the only experience was that of snowmen. Then we let us be involved from the pleasure of creating and modelling cubes of ice and snow to turn them in subjects designed from ourselves ".
To participate in this kind of competitions you have to form a team, respond to calls that are published on the Internet and propose a draft of the sculpture.
If the design or model is selected and accepted, you got to prepare the luggage, with scarves, sweaters, bits and all the job tools, and leave for Scandinavia, Sweden, Canada and the east.
"In these competitions participates who only wants fun, or who, for job, builds sculptures, not only of snow and ice, but also to made of sand and anything else – adds Bonetti – the sculptures are of different types.
Many work figurative on creating squirrels, flakes of snow or Christmas souvenirs. We prefer concern ourselves with forms that have a convincing artistic intention and that are both beautiful and pleasant to see, but also funny and ironic". After two editions, the 2000 and 2001, "Art in ice", Luca Bonetti, Nadia Braito, who works as graphics, and Mary Rosin from Venice, were chosen for the competition of January 2002 in Valloire, France, one of the most important international competitions.
Their work, sort of meadow with enormous tufts of snow, as high as 4 meters, in front of which men were put on the same plan as ants, has been appreciated, as the two sculptures carried out at the beginning of this year in South Tyrol. Nadia, Luca and the two architects Gianmario and Manuela, accompanied by Claudia Azzalini last fatigue, was the creation, in Colorado, of a huge fossil find of modern civilization, which was a bar code. "We pretended – explains Luca Bonetti – to be a crew of extraterrestrial-palaeontologists, in arrival on earth in 2,200 after Christ from the star Betelgeuse. In front of a similar archaeological find of the civilization of consumption we wondered “ Did Homo Tecnologicus make something wrong?” ". The four are already thinking of their next appointment with a cube of ice and pressed snow, of 12 feet in height and 10 of a width.
Ilenia Pusterla
Issued on "Il Giorno" April, 23 2003