Space Ibiza’s Sant Antoni shop will host, from Thursday October 31st at 7.30pm, Manel Mateu’s bottled boats showcase. The reproduced boats, almost all sailboats, are miniature reproductions of all-time famous boats, many of them from Ibiza.

The author of these artworks, who has also worked as a machinist -apart from having been Sant Antoni’s mayor during the 80’s- doesn’t seem to have surgeon hands. Nevertheless he makes his own tools and puts a sticker on every thread in order to know which one he has to pull. He also uses a lightened lens in order to work with 0,6 millimeters drills, which make almost invisible holes.

Manel, who spends almost one month working on every boat and is now working on a MayFlower replica, highlights the difficulty of finding transparent and high quality glass bottles. The shape of the bottle also conditions the boat’s size. The hardest bottles to work with are the ones with long and stretch neck, as the needles can’t easily get in and move.  

Source: El Diario de Ibiza