Supervenice

Sara Marini
Supervenice

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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Manfredo Tafuri
Nella tempesta

Brief excerpt from La “nuova Costantinopoli”. La rappresentazione della “renovatio” nella Venezia dell’Umanesimo (1450-1509), in “Rassegna”, no. 9, year IV, March 1982, pp. 36-37

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Paul O. Robinson
Site Castings: Entwinements in Palazzo Fortuny

Site Castings: Entwinements in Palazzo Fortuny explores the technical and narrative unveiling of surfaces as manifested through multiform artworks generated from, and resituated within, the context of Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny. Surface is first considered in terms of its speculative – perceptual – relationship to content in defining form; the second part addresses the idea of evidence, in particular the evidentiary image, and the idea that Venice, as a consequence of its visual abundance, has been rendered a victim reimagined by the continual appropriations of its image. The third part entwines the first two briefs as an entry into the working modalities defining Site Castings, focusing on the X-ray as a means to generate manifold transformative processes. The works comprising Site Castings embody various mediums of representation – X-rays, mixed-media paintings and talisman-like sculptures – that serve to transform the examined artifactual evidence found in the aftermath of occupation into reformed two- and three-dimensional artworks that are then recomposed as spatial correspondences within the context of their origins – the palazzo.

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Luigi Guzzardi
Scatturin’s Home Studio by Carlo Scarpa: Encounters and Relationships in the Venice of the Nineteen-Fifties and Sixties

The contribution proposes a contextual reading of Carlo Scarpa’s project – realized between 1961 and 1963 – of the lawyer Luigi Scatturin’s Home Studio. In order to fully understand the project, it is interesting to read again the figure of the architecture client and of the cultural life in the Venice of the Nineteen-Fifties and Sixties. The lawyer was in Scarpa’s the defence team during the serious court cases of which the professor was subject to. The lawyer-client relationship played by the two protagonists will find a formal high definition in the space and in the furnishings made for the Home Studio in calle degli Avvocati.
The project is read through the documents located in Archivio di Stato di Treviso – Centro Carlo Scarpa and avail of Scatturin’s interview in the 1984 little-known RAI documentary: Carlo Scarpa. Un tenace amore and of Lea Quaretti memories in her Diario, recently published by Neri Pozza. The master’s work does not renounce to interpret the client’s demands and personality, but, at the same time, it represents a synthesis of Scarpa’s existential biography in the light of the contemporary events of the city’s life.

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Paolo Ceccon
Beyond a Revealing Silence.
Recondition of Scatturin’s Home Studio by Carlo Scarpa

Scarpa’s architecture is paradigmatic of a conception of the work as a representation of oneself. Any alteration, as it may cause the loss of an inexpressible charm, requires, first and foremost, judgment, attention and care in expressing preferences. Oblivion and knowledge of the present are the extremes of a dialectic inherent to the project that can govern our ‘critical intervals’, ‘temporal sections of thought’ that measure the real distance from architectural structure and from the weight of responsibility towards ‘the legacy’. A useful detachment that can be achieved through a necessary oblivion, an amnesia that ushers in understanding and action.
From this, a perceptive, Bergsonian notion of movement suggests the process of mutation of the space. Three design strategies have been identified by action on sequences, on the interplay of light and shadow, on the movement-images: the first, physical, punctual, on the structure of the apartment; a second, inductive, diffuse, able to introduce new fields of attention; the last one, based on analogy, will include the multiple strata of Venetian living within the new narrative.

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Robert Henke
Venice Dust

In February 2019, Berlin based audio-visual composer Robert Henke spent two weeks in Venice, working on a multichannel concert piece, and preparing for its premiere at Palazzo Grassi. The text provides an introduction into the artist’s approach and methodology. It shows how the abstract geometry of a city can be interpreted as rhythm and structure, and its details as texture, its light and colours as timbre. It shows how the presence inside such a structure influences the work of the artist. Although now direct ‘mapping’ or ‘sonification’ happens, being in Venice whilst working on a composition leaves traces in the work, and in this case this is highly intentional and rationalised. The text is a personal insight, yet it shows patterns which are typical for artistic creation and can be adapted to many fields of creative expression.

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Mario Piana
A ‘Long-lasting’ Restoration: the Palazzo dei Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa

The contribution concentrates on the long-lasting restoration of Palazzo dei Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, in particular it focuses on the techniques used and the methods adopted in the four phases in which the intervention was articulated. After the first emergency interventions and the preliminary analysis, starting from 1984, the working process was aimed to: re-establish the static of the vast palace, by working on the stability of the vertical and horizontal structures and the foundations, and by renovating doors and windows; restore the decorative cycles and re-integrate the palace’s decorations by consolidating, cleaning and protecting them; secure the ground floor from tidal flooding and integrate the building with the equipment necessary to inhabit it again.

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Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
The Watern Costellations

A short story, between prose and poem, about slow water, inhospitable mountains, impossible tasks, inane repetition, vast temporalities, screaming superegos and aquatic releases. It is a story about Venice.

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Manuele Fior
Celestia

Celestia is truly the Venice of a parallel world: names and times change, but the dynamics that have made this island a haven from the barbarian invasions, then a centre of trade and culture, and finally the global icon of mass tourism stay the same.
Excerpt from the graphic novel Celestia by Manuele Fior, vol. I forthcoming November 2019, vol. II forthcoming in 2020, Oblomov, Quartu Sant’Elena.

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Nicola Emery
Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Venice

Venice is not among the places that are portrayed by Benjamin in his posthumous book Städtebilder. However, the essay shows how the young Benjamin visited Venice and his lagoon and how he wrote about it, while also, in a later writing, he referred the photographic reproductions of the Serenissima. The essay highlights how the young Benjamin’s Venetian days coincided with those of the revelries organised in the city to celebrate the reconstruction of the St. Mark’s Campanile. Benjamin – because of the rest of the collapse’s rubbles, as well as under the suggestion of his travel to the miserable Chioggia – made an illuminating association between the reality of this Venice that tends to an immune and mythically fateful “always the same” and the imaginary reality of Perle, Alfred Kubin’s masterpiece, The Other Side. Venice resembles Perle and, in its turn, Perle calls to mind Venice, according to an hermeneutic circle, rich of implications.

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Gabriele Monti
Le Bal. The Violent Surface of the Venetian Parties

This paper aims to analyze the ball organized by Don Carlos de Beistegui at Palazzo Labia on September 3, 1951, also known as the bal du siècle, in order to develop some considerations on the relationship between the image of Venice as a place for scenic artifice and the illusionistic elements of fashion. It does so by reworking the interpretations which fashion gave of Venice during the 20th century, and by using the concept of glamour as it has been discussed by Stephen Gundle (2008).
The case of the Beistegui ball, retold through the chronicles and images of the time, suggests a possible dialogue between fashion and balls in Venice, which emphasizes both an almost violent rapidity and a profound superficiality: two dimensions which seem to inhabit those two worlds of fashion and balls, and which assert their capability to interpret the contemporaneity, because they are simultaneously out of time.

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Fernando Quesada
The Superlabyrinth of the Community in Exile

The ghetto nuovo of Venice is an architectural structure of enormous formal clarity within the three ghettos: old, new and novissimo. This condition has been completely maintained in its parti from its foundation to the present day. The form of the ghetto has provoked and still provokes today an array of social evocations of a community of alterity relatively harmonious in itself. For three hundred years the ghetto was closed at night and patrolled by nautical guards in the surrounding canal. The ghetto nuovo has many similarities with other residential areas of the city built around a campo; it is a structure of very compact housing that leaves a central void. However, the interior subdivision of its spaces and its height is an anomaly in the Venetian urban fabric that made the ghetto an object of attention for travelers, chroniclers and even for the Venetians themselves.
Despite its chaotic, spontaneous, exotic and picturesque condition, this article interprets the ghetto nuovo as a highly regulated architectural structure, replete with contradictions and representative of the errant condition that has historically characterized the Hebrew culture. Read as a formal superlabyrinth, the ghetto nuovo is an anticity and anti-architecture of exile that handles very complex alternative parameters of inclusion and exclusion, of citizenship and exile, of architectural form and social significance. In the ghetto, all these parameters are openly displaced within a rigid architectural container.

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Annalisa Sacchi
The Stage Curtain Will Open on a Fire.
Venice: from the Blaze of La Fenice to the Novel of Ashes

Until the introduction of electricity, the average life of a theater building was calculated to be around thirty years. The theaters were regularly razed to the ground by fires and, often, rebuilt in the place where they already stand. Such is the story of all the Venetian theaters, the very same that repeated twice in the case of the most important city theater: La Fenice.
The text analyzes the relationship of theaters with the accident of the fire. Besides, it highlights the essential intimacy that runs between the factual event of the stake and the ontological status of the theater – the art of non-permanence –, namely, to have radical loss as a horizon and limit.
It is in Venice that in 2005, less than ten years after the last fire that burnt La Fenice, Romeo Castellucci of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio signs a Theater Biennale entirely dedicated to the stake and entitled ‘Pompei. The Novel of Ashes’. Castellucci, during his career, has repeatedly invoked the fire as the blind spot of the performance, and in this Biennale, opened by Flame Tornado, a column of fire more than 15 meters high by the artist Kevin Binkert, explores the limits and the possibilities of rebirth of a theater passed through the mental fire of his thought.

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Serenella Iovino
Reading the Bodies of Venice.
Journeys across the Lagoon’s Storied Materialities

Emerged around the Nineties, ecological literary studies are a bourgeoning research field nourished by multifaceted theoretical motives. One of the debate’s most recent developments is material ecocriticism, a theoretical approach influenced by the new materialisms, whose main premise is that the world’s materiality has an intrinsic semiotic dimension. The world can, in other words, be read as a text, a storied dimension emerging from the interlaced agency of nature and culture, of physical elements and discursive practices. All our interactions with this text are interpretations. However, far from being relegated to the field of abstractions so dear to postmodern deconstructionism, these interpretations have indeed material consequences: these are the crises that affect our ecosystems, landscapes and socio-environmental balances.
A shortened version of a chapter of the book Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (Bloomsbury, London - New York 2016) this essay concentrates on Venice as a text made out of embodied stories – a material text, in which natural dynamics, cultural practices, political visions, and industrial choices are interlaced with other bodies, both human and nonhuman, in issues of justice, health, and ecology. The underlying idea is that the progressive loss of a ‘sensitive interpretation’ of the lagoon has determined a conversion of Venice into a mere scenery. The consequences of this are not only visible in the high levels of industrial pollution, but also in the ever-increasing high tides (and the inadequate ways to keep them under control), the unsustainable tourism of humongous cruise ships, and the normal human activities interfering with this delicate ecosystem. Taking literary works, theatrical plays, and ‘living’ cases as my focus, the author tries to show how reading these bodily and literary texts in mutual combination can amplify the often-unheard voices of Venice’s reality.

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Riccardo Miotto
Turnstiles

The series entitled Turnstiles proposes three site-specific projects – intentionally paradoxical – concerning the regulation of Piazza San Marco’s access. The research material is taken from newspaper articles that reported the possible establishment of some turnstiles at the main entrances to the city of Venice. Each project is presented through two images – views and ex tempore schemes both immersed in black light – which outline the structures and their mode of operation. Each one of them sets up a specific posture or behavior that the visitor must assume. The series – conceived as a visual discourse – reflects on the theatrical nature of the turnstile device, whose bollard effect seems to be more effective on a communicative rather than practical level. Traces of unrealized projects relentlessly redesign the profiles of the city, whose image is apparently bound to timeless portraits.

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Giovanni Marras
Inverse Radicalism: the Void as a Value, Urban Studies as a Tool

The call for tenders for the design of the New Sacca del Tronchetto was published on February 27, 1964. The competition awarded five ex-aequo first prizes to an equal number of teams, and a special second prize to the aptly-named NOVISSIME project by Samonà’s team. NOVISSIME, from the strictly cultural point of view, radically proposes to bring the city back to its 18th century appearance. If, on the one hand, it may seem romantic to restore to the city its ancient layout, on the other, the explanatory report that accompanied the project leaves no doubt about the radicalism of the proposal. The urban studies that drives the scalpel and bulldozer action of the NOVISSIME project draws scientific support from a series of researches which identify in Samonà’s Iuav an important centre.
The explanatory report, a reference text for an apocryphal theory of urban voids, is the basis for a sort of inverse radicalism that, prophetically, considers urban void rather than the semantic redundancy of the architectural sign as the discriminating value of the characteristics of the built environment.

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Giuseppe Samonà (capogruppo), Costantino Dardi, Emilio Mattioni, Valeriano Pastor, Gianugo Polesello, Alberto Samonà, Luciano Semerani, Gigetta Tamaro, Egle Renata Trincanato
Explanatory Report motto: NOVISSIME

Translation curated by Giovanni Marras of the Explanatory Report of the Novissime Project: International Competition for drawing up the 3D urban masterplan of the Nuova Sacca del Tronchetto, held at the Archivio Progetti of the Università Iuav di Venezia, fund Egle Renata Trincanato.

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Luca Trevisani
Costum Car Commando. I.e. Not All Travels Are for Leisure

On May 8, 1997, shortly after midnight, a group of eight men in camouflage uniforms conquer the heart of Venice by assaulting the Campanile of piazza San Marco, at the head of a bizarre military vehicle. Custom Car Commando is the critical account of that traumatic insurrectional journey, written outlining the explicit and latent links that exist between that emblematic lagoon tumult and the grammar of rebellion developed by the visual arts in the 20th century, the iconography of self-construction, situationist piracy and the camp imaginary as codified by Kenneth Anger.
Traveling means listening to the call of a gravitational centre. The memorable initiatory gesture of the Venetian separatists was a political pilgrimage, a disruptive ritual, a public writing project that disobeyed normative rhetoric, a disorder of shared myths developed by appropriating labels and codes of the happening and public art: outlining its genealogy means investigating the transfiguration of the language of art in everyday life, and defining the barrier between symbolic and real aggression.

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Supervoid+Friel
The Giardini of the Biennale di Venezia. Dialogue and Clashes between National and International Aspirations

As part of the Ring section, the contribution presents two different tendencies in the project of the Biennale Pavilions in the Giardini, divided between national and international languages. The redraw of the pavilions’ façades and their chronological addition within the area offers a visual representation of this clash, while a brief text opens to a possible reflection on their current implications.
The National Pavilions inside the Giardini of the Biennale are bound by relationships that allow a clear reading of the historical development of the site and present through their form a vivid image of the political will of the nations that built them at that very moment in history. While the balance of power between the western countries is clearly represented and national languages dominate the façades of the pavilions during the first decades of the 20th century, starting from the Fifties the ambition to belong to a broader cultural territory comes along with a new and international architectural language.

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Fabrizio Antonelli
The Stones (of Venice) Tell Stories: How to Read Them

The main historical moments that led to the import and the architectural use of ancient stones and marbles of exotic and Italian origin in the city of Venice are here briefly recalled. The contribution highlights the importance of petrographic and archaeometric studies in the Venetian context, where the stone materials shape the architectural landscape. At times structured in form of tutorial, text and images list and illustrate the operations that are necessary to read in Venice’s stones the techniques, the visions and the strategies to operate on the city. It is clear that the identification, the evaluation of their conditions in qualitative and quantitative terms, and the knowledge of stone materials’ history of use, are here particularly important and significant. This is the case, for example, of the Saint Mark’s Basilica’s floor, a real ‘stone world map’ obtained by reusing marbles from the most important quarries of the ancient Mediterranean.

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Massimo Santanicchia
Amphibious

The term ‘amphibious’ needs to be understood as force that connects earthlings and their natural and built environment. If architects are to find effective solutions to the most pressing problems of the 21st century they will need to learn to be amphibious and re-design the way we engage with the world. Venice constitutes an important lesson for the future of humanity, as its values resides in its capacity of becoming one another both in natural terms land and water and in bringing together diverse people and cultures.

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Angela Vettese
Biennial

The Venice Biennial, founded in 1895, has been the first show of its kind in the world. Its formula is based on a central show and several satellite events, spread in the whole lagoon, among which the National Pavilions are the most discussed and yet the most successful part: as a ‘multicellular show’, it avoids the unique point of view of a single curator. It has been enlarging its influence on the territory of the town of Venice and it has been the trigger for many private foundations focused on contemporary arts. Even if often criticised, specially for its refuse to deny the idea of Nation, it has proven to be a good vehicle for the cultural and economic development of the city.
In particular, its capacity to bring in town experimental artistic attitudes matches with the vocation of the town itself: albeit Venice has a reputation for its obsessive link with the past, it actually could survive and still survives as a cultural centre in the world thanks to its capacity to mix the ancient and the new, in a lively overlapping of styles and ideas. The contribution shows both the inclination of the biennial to rethink curatorial practices and its way to reinterpret the everlasting view on the future that, counterintuitively, characterizes the city up to nowadays.

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Léa-Catherine Szacka
Crowd

On July 15, 1989, the city of Venice was stormed by a large crowd that had reached the city in order to assist to a free and open-air concert of the English rock band Pink Floyd. United by music, the crowd occupied the city and became the symbol of a ‘continuous opposition between past and present’ and a clash between two ideas of the city. Looking at the signification of the term ‘crowd’ in its interaction with historic city centres, this text recalls the infamous night of the Venetian concert and raises questions related to the rise of mass tourism and the ever-increasing spectacularization of cities.

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Milovan Farronato
Ultra

Simeon Stylites and his vertical exile at fourteen meters high that lasted thirty-seven years. One year less than Sarah Winchester’s tortuous construction of the endless, and apparently meaningless, home in Northern California. The penitence so out of scale of the anchorite and the architectural hypertrophy of the heiress to exorcise a fear that cannot be renounced. The death by relentless accumulation of the Collyer brothers and the Hikikomori. The Republic of Rose Island and the epicurean láthe biósas. The myth of Sisyphus and the image of Priapus, the monstrously immeasurable. The iron carriers in 5th-century Syria and Mark Lombardi’s maps (together with the omnivorous readings that made them possible): constellations and points nebulae, patterns formulated by intricate lines, arcs and circumferences that early illustrated the nature and the existence of the links between global finance and international terrorism. Kim Jones’ war games in total solipsism, victim and executioner in alternating sequence. Andy Warhol’s supposed autism, his wig and his Time Capsules.

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Lorenzo Calvelli
Venetiae

This contribution investigates the uses of the place name Venetiae, which is attested by written sources since the early Roman imperial period. This toponym may refer to different territories, all located in north-eastern Italy and characterised by undefined and switching borders, as well as by the presence of both land and water. Such plurality of meanings still exists today, when multiple ‘Venices’ overlap in the age of over-tourism and virtual reality.

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Alessandra Pagliano
Zootropio

The Zoetrope is an instrument designed by the British mathematician William George Horner, in 1834, to provide the optical effect of images (drawings) in motion. It was born in the experimental climate before the birth of the cinema, which had already led to the invention of the Thaumatrope (1825), the Anorthoscope (1828) and the Phenachistoscope (1832). The device consists of a hollow cylinder with loopholes; along the intrados was placed a series of drawings in sequence. The cylinder rotated around its vertical axis and the observers, looking at the drawings through the rapid succession of loopholes, perceived the illusion that those static images made real movements. The instrument is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision, described in 1829 by Joseph Plateau, who affirmed that human eye holds a perceived image for a few fractions of a second, even after its disappearance.

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