Venice is well-known, its identity is so familiar to be considered obvious, summarized as if it were a replicable logo: the city shows its face leaving behind its backbone. Here gold and mud blend together, moulding a multifaceted document. In Venice an endless interchange between real and imaginary, original and fake, tiny and huge, powerful and fragile endures, while we look at the city as a shimmering object.

The alter ego of what is well-known and obvious becomes superlative, since it exceeds predetermined standards; furthermore, it represents the inconceivable condensed in the prefix of another language as it is revealed only when one leaves the city and looks at it from above. Suddenly actions, projects, works and methods arise from its established image moving the city towards another dimension, transfiguring it. This (super) slow wind blows through Venice but does not change it: Venice continues to offer its well-known face to the mirror that every day reflects it. Challenging that wind to go deeply inside the object, means diving into the detours and contradictions of Supervenice, at least for the time of a story on paper. Venice is constantly designed and painstakingly ‘preserved’, fortuitously born in a hostile land that denies any rules of contemporary sustainability; since its foundation Venice has been built on desires and fears. The city faces the remains of the largest industrial area in Europe. A bibliographic hypertrophy lays against the material trace of 20th century modernity: a gigantic ideal library has been created by measuring the most erratic and moody city of the Western World. Even if Marco Polo found Venice boring – so boring he did not want to return from his long journey –, its stability depends on the Sirocco and the moon, like in an Oriental environment. This primordial indeterminacy makes Venice a valuable laboratory – that would not be possible elsewhere – to reflect upon critical issues for up-coming future. The context changes and, with it, certainty wavers. This is the time to reopen the paths of research and project: Supervenice digs into an all too well-known territory in order to extract its anachronical genealogies. The super alter ego of Venice is a giant bubble that suspends Time while Space wavers: what remains is the space of project.

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