The Asteroid Award 2014 is the work of Trieste-based artist Davide Comelli, born in 1981, a graphic design graduate from the Trieste Istituto d’Arte and the Urbino Istituto Superiore Industrie Artistiche.
Comelli has been living down and out in Barcelona, Berlin and Paris, and has been working both in Italy and abroad as a graphic designer, illustrator and graffiti artist. He has been involved in the latter capacity in a number of urban restyling projects funded by the Trieste municipality: his latest, completed in September 2014, is Home sweet home, a giant graffiti artwork on the wall of a council house in the Ponziana neighbourhood. For his work on the Asteroid Award, the artist has drawn inspiration from the word “science-fiction” or “a fantastic invention based on scientific elements”. The subject of his piece, made by assembling metal scraps, is a bug taken from an entomology lab and transformed into a robot. The artist has deliberately confined the design stages to a few volume study sketches, in order to allow creative freedom to flow directly from the metal “forms” he collected, which were the real inspiration to create not a realistic bug, but a robot-like being. The “bug” theme began with a series of pictures taken in a number of natural history museums, and has been used by Comelli before in the interior decorating of an IT company in Trieste. Today, it’s been revisited by the artist for the 2014 Trieste Science+Fiction, in a new science-fiction perspective, as a “tech bug”.
Davide Comelli’s insect robot
