Vespera: The Twilight Afterparty Sunglasses Vanni & Valentina Furian Launch Exclusive New Collaboration

The VESPERA collection is the result of a creative collaboration between VANNI and the artist Valentina Furian, winner of the VANNI #artistroom Award at Ar-tissima 2025, presented by UNA galleria. It compris-es three unique, limited-edition models of metal sun-glasses

Born in 1989 in Venice, she lives and works in Turin.
Valentina Furian is a visual artist who works primarily with moving images. Her practice operates on the boundary between reality and fiction through a cinematic dynamic that emerges from the duality between fictional narratives and documentary inquiry. Interspecies relationships become the terrain through which she explores the connections between social norms and a dimension of ‘wildness’, understood as a force that transcends and challenges forms of control.
Her works have recently been exhibited at: Castello di Rivoli, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Guarene, Rome Quadriennale, BIENALSUR, and Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires (ARG); including two residencies at the Cité des Arts in Paris (FR) and ISCP in Brooklyn (US).

She is represented by UNA gallery, Piacenza | Milan.

“My research has always explored the threshold between control and its loss, between the tamed and the wild, between night and day, with the constant aim of pushing and redefining the boundaries of identity. VESPERA fits into this journey as the physical and sculptural synthesis of this exploration: with these spectacles, I wanted to create a device that protects us and, in some way, masks us. It is an object that leads the body to inhabit a boundary and transcend it”

Valentina Furian

VESPERA is a threshold object, a pair of ‘afterparty’ sunglasses, de-signed for communities that traverse twilight together, collectively experiencing the transition from night to day. The name is inspired by Vesperus: the embodiment of evening; and Venus: the first star to shine in the night and the last to fade in the first light of dawn.

Conceived as an enveloping mask, these sunglasses conceal the gaze, evoking the myth of Medusa. The sculptural structure of the frames directly translates the mythological narrative: the side arms mimic the sinuous form of a snake, recalling the serpents descending from the Gorgon’s face. The result of research into metamorphosis, VESPERA stands as a ritual object to be worn in that suspended limbo of time, the hour ‘entre chien et loup’, when boundaries fade and it becomes diffi-cult to distinguish the tamed from the wild.

Three models of sunglasses that share the same frame design and are customised through their colourways and lenses. Made entirely from thin metal, with a rectangular low-profile, wraparound shape, they feature flexible steel temples with an engraved pattern that mimics snakeskin.

The design is available in three colourways that combine metal and sun-protective lenses: ‘total black’, to simulate Medusa’s gaze; ‘sil-ver’, to recreate the reflective effect of the ta-petum lucidum; and the special limited-edition silver with red-tinted lenses, dedicated to the enhanced night vision of nocturnal creatures.

Launched by VANNI – the Turin-based creative eyewear brand – in 2019, the VANNI #artistroom prize at Artissima is awarded to the artist whose work offers an original perspective on reality, opening up – just as a lens would – an unexpected and surprising horizon.

The award encourages the exploration of potential cross-pollination between contemporary art and eyewear design. The winner, selected by a multi-sector jury of experts, receives a cash prize and the opportunity to design and collaborate on the creation of a capsule collection of artist-designed eyewear, which are produced in a limited edition.
The winner of the fifth edition of the Valentina Furian Prize was selected by a transdisciplinary jury comprising Nicolas Ballario (journalist), Cristian Chironi (artist) and Fiammetta Griccioli (cura-tor). The jury’s statement read: “Valentina Furian’s artistic vision is characterised by her ability to explore and bring together the relationship between the body and the gaze, between the human and post-human dimensions, generating novel perspectives that engage in dialogue with VANNI’s experimental and innovative research”.
The artists who have created the previous capsule collections are: Cristian Chironi (CONCRETE), Catalin Pislaru (I BREATH POETRY), Teresa Giannico (VISUM), Elisa Alberti (EMBRACE) and Nicola Bizzarri (GOGGLES).