Exposure: Virtual Venice

The second project used narratives found in literature, film, and painting, to construct an imagined architecture: a Virtual Venice. Selected chapters from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino inspired the proposals of virtual or imagined room and street. The Marco Frascari essay Lume Materiale gave an introduction to qualities of light and materiality specific to Venice. Between these evocative dual guides - literary and analytical - lies the space of exploration, the city of the imagination. Focusing on a single room and street provoked an interest in everyday processes and the possibilities of inhabitation.

Polo: ‘Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.’ ‘There is still one of which you never speak.’ Marco Polo bowed his head. ‘Venice,’ the Khan said. Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’ The emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’ And Polo said ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

suspended rooms for an artist - composite photograms by Andriani Plessa

Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes. Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street and home.
Walter Benjamin, Naples, from One-way Street, and other writings.

collages (top to bottom) fisherman's shelter by Nenad Djordjevic, astronomer and fishermen’s huts by Ramsey Yassa, theatrical street by Piotr Skrzycki


hanging streets - model by Charanpal Matharu