One of the last works created by American artist and set designer Bob Wilson, who passed away last August 1, was a poster. "There are people who think they belong in the sea." 

Wilson's poster for the Barcolana, the historic sailing regatta held in October in the Gulf of Trieste, is inspired by a line from Lady from the Sea, the 1990s collaboration that saw him direct and set designer alongside Susan Sontag in a new staging of Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name: a drama revolving around Ellida, a woman trapped in a kind of domestic imprisonment, torn between her bond with her husband and her irrational and destructive attraction to a mysterious sailor. 

Wilson translated this tension into a then-radical scenic language: essential geometries, bare surfaces, sharp lines, blue-dominated chromatics and slowed-down acting, punctuated by the almost declamatory voice of Sontag's text. All elements that return in the poster for the Barcolana 2025, a project in collaboration with illycaffè. In the design, different shades of blue fill the sky, sea and sails, while the key elements of the regatta are condensed into archetypal graphic signs. 

A tension toward reduction and visual essentiality that had also characterized his sound installation at the Pieta Rondanini Museum during this year's Milan Design Week. Mother – that was the name of the last work Wilson presented in Milan – was a play starring something that cannot act: "a statue – not just any statue, but the unfinished one Michelangelo worked on until his death." 

Opening image: Barcolana poster, 2025. Courtesy illycaffè