TEN is a retrospective exhibition of the Atelier dell’Errore collective, presenting some of the most significant bodies of work produced since 2015—when the visual arts workshop for neurodivergent children, founded in 2002 by Bergamo-born artist Luca Santiago Mora, became a professional collective based at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Following a non-chronological path through the key moments of their artistic journey over the past decade, the exhibition unfolds across Spazio Zero—featuring the new series Unknown Pleasures, focused on the theme of sexuality—and the first and second floors of the museum, where AdE’s works coexist with pieces from Una Galleria, Tante Collezioni and the Thinking Like a Mountain program.
The exhibition offers a unique trajectory within contemporary art through paintings, drawings, videos, and installations from the past ten years. TEN is a living portrait of a radical collective organism, grounded in just two operating principles: Animals and Errors.
Animals are the sole subject in AdE’s works, and nothing is ever erased during the artistic process—preserving and igniting the transformative and metamorphic potential within every so-called “error.” Side by side, AdE’s artists build a new visual lexicon, rooted in necessary deviations, sudden intuitions, and shared visions.
Operating like a contemporary Renaissance workshop, the group brings rigor and visionary practice together. Each of the twelve artists specializes in a specific phase of ideation and execution, intertwining hands, minds, and bodies to generate singular and unrepeatable works. Drawing is their native language, and through storytelling—plural, inner, and imaginative—AdE amplifies the transformative power of thought, activated by prophetic, ever-evolving creatures: polymorphic, mutant animals that challenge the limits of the real, inhabit thresholds, and invade the imagination.
These are not archetypes, but unexpected inhabitants of a possible future—figures in a fantastic zoology that has evolved over time. From protective, salvific beings, through entomological boundaries, AdE’s animals have now become organisms of utopian pleasure, projections of socially unexplored desires released into the exhibition space with visceral urgency.
TEN is a journey through this ecosystem, an exploration of its evolutionary stages—an experimental taxonomy that does not merely represent, but acts: it alters landscapes and shifts the viewer’s gaze. A poetic invasion that upends rules, topples hierarchies, and opens up unexpected spaces.
