He had never studied fine arts, nor had he ever drawn. Michel Vecchi managed his family’s hotels in the Italian Alps, but he was also a great adventurer who travelled the world with his wife and a backpack, living with the Dogon people in Mali, crossing the ocean by boat, or visiting such exotic places as Samoa or New Guinea. So many experiences undoubtedly opened his eyes to all kinds of cultural influences. And like so many others, Ibiza was the key that unlocked a remarkable artistic sensibility that, with a father and two uncles who were architects and a grandfather who was a painter and inventor, no doubt ran through her veins.
When he had his first child, he handed over his business to his brother, and he and his wife decided to come to the island for a couple of months. They fell in love with the experience in the mountains of Sant Miquel and with their second child they looked for another house to renovate, a beautiful place near Es Broll, where they are still based, although they divide their time with their life in Italy and other trips. “We came in 2012 for 4 months and we are still here… and we are still fixing up the house.” With his radical change of life, from hotelier in Montblanc to permaculture course and vegetable garden in Ibiza, Michel spent a lot of time in contact with nature… and suddenly he started making wooden sculptures, first faces or masks, later his characteristic cacti and mushrooms, with which he wanted to decorate his own garden: “I wanted to make myself a fantastic world… and in the end people like this fantastic world very much.”
Following the principles of sustainability, Michel recycles the wood he works with, uses trees that have fallen in the wind, or chooses trunks from firewood outlets, trees without bugs or fungi, that are dry, but not too dry… and in the shapes they present, he already begins to glimpse the piece he wants to create, working in his garden with the chainsaw. Sometimes he works with trunks of up to 600kg. Sometimes he also works on dead trees, sculpting them without removing them from the earth, respecting their roots, as in Can Tomás or Tierra Iris; in Italy he has even made some up to 4 metres high. “For me, every tree has a power. When I am working with wood, a message or power comes to me and I write it on each mushroom, and at the base of each figure, I place a copper and aluminium spiral, like a new root.” The stunning natural environment where he lives is his main source of inspiration. ‘“We live in the true north of Ibiza, here the locals still cultivate the land. For me this wonderful environment was my great inspiration.”
It all took on an extra dimension when, at his home in the Italian mountains, he saw mushrooms growing on his mushroom sculptures one day and it occurred to him to listen to and record the music they produced using Plant Choir, a device (there are many others) with two electrodes that are applied to any living plant, recognising its electrical signals and transforming them into music. “You can choose 40 different instruments with this model, even connect it to a synthesiser… but I’m not a musician, I did something very simple.” At the TEDx in Ibiza last March he created a small garden with his sculptures, each with its own message, where you could walk around with headphones listening to the music of the plants. A beautiful and very revealing experience. “It was the first time people listened to my music and the reaction was impressive: two ladies started crying, another was dancing, others were happy.” He adds: “I like the idea of walking in a forest of mushrooms, seeing all the messages, feeling the energy that is created, listening to this music… It’s like a journey inside yourself.”
Michel had two exhibitions in Italy and immediately sold all the pieces. His friends and acquaintances started asking him for his sculptures and through word of mouth and Instagram he has started to become more and more known and receive more and more commissions. “When I have a lot of pieces together it creates a kind of shared energy and soon after they all go away and I have to start all over again, they are kind of like little mushroom tribes.” Obviously, all his pieces are unique, always accompanied by his message and the spiral that connects them to the earth.
At Flashback Habitat, a 10,000m2 contemporary art centre in Turin, they will have a forest with his mushrooms. “For Art Week in Turin in November I want to play the music, I’m going to record the music there because mushrooms have grown on top of my mushrooms… Or else I’ll record the music of the beech trees that the mushrooms are made of.” There is also a hotel that wants to put his sculptures in the garden, accompanied by the music of the plants: “So that the guests can enter the real garden.”You may also have seen his mushrooms at the Trip party at Club Chinois, where they have been since last summer, or at the Fantasia Ibiza Festival in May. In July, he will also be doing an exhibition in the mountains of Italy, at 1,600 metres up and in the open air, where the famous natural installation ‘Il terzo Paradiso’, by the Italian painter and sculptor Michelangelo Pistoletto, is located. “I also intend to talk to some DJs here in Ibiza to see what we can do.”
Tremendously restless, his head is always spinning with new projects. “I bought an electromagnetic field meter, I made a mushroom with certain materials that eliminate magnetic fields. I have already tested it and it works, I have to study it more, but there are many studies on Hartmann’s nodes that say that, all over the world, where the parallels and meridians cross, the electricity there is quintupled, they are dangerous. It’s interesting because if you have one of these Hartmann’s nodes in your house you can be very overloaded with electricity. I’m going to perfect a mushroom like that and put it next to the bed, for example.”
His aim is to make us reflect on the importance of keeping in touch with nature: “What I want to convey is that we have everything in nature and that we only have to learn and study from it, we have to stop and listen to it, nature is also us, it is to enter into resonance with ourselves.” A true artist of the earth whose aim is to create little snippets of beauty: “I like to bring a bit of magic into the world.”
