Laboratory with Giulia Bruno e Armin Linke | Artistic project: cultural reading of operational and archival images from institutions related to the logistics of the city and the Aqua Granda event.

About the Laboratory

Venice has a long tradition of representing its landscape and lagoon as an artificial ecosystem. Artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke wonder how the operational images captured in recent years, through simple mobile phones or digital equipment, will in the future play a role of cultural testimony at the same level as sketches, paintings, and hydrographic, urbanistic, and cultural notes created with analog means throughout the centuries.

Due to its urbanistic peculiarities and its material and immaterial artistic heritage, Venice has been universally declared, together with its lagoon, a UNESCO World Heritage. 

Climate change is progressively acting and modifying not only the landscape but also the ecosystems, the boundary between land and sea, and the logistics necessary for maintaining the city’s operativeness and livability.

The "water" theme is one of the contemporary critical issues. Artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke intend to look at Venice as an ecosystem, connected to the sea system and tides, an example of how future cities may have to organize their logistics and management in an eco-sustainable way. Through the collection and study of technical images produced by a network of important institutions, aimed at ensuring the invisible and constant functioning and monitoring of the city in anticipation of high-water events, we contribute to the creation of a new path for a historical archive through images produced for logistic, technical, and functional purposes.

Through interpretation, we collect knowledge that goes beyond images and becomes an operational manual for the future. We use a stratigraphic series of comments and notes starting from material collected and commented through different media, archival and non-archival, photographs, audio, film, and interviews. The final aim is to create a multimedia exhibition that connects the different materials, to propose questions about the logistics of the future, climate change, water and oceans, extraordinary weather events (including high tide events), and the preservation of the city's technical heritage through a poetic revisitation that also uses mobility spaces of a city of Venice, which are in a continuous fluid state. 

The invited institutions will comment on the event using administrative, operational, and multimedia materials collected by, or shared with, AquaGranda, such as photographs and other archived content. Experts will be assisted by artists who, by selecting and proposing narrative frames, will bring out the story of the event from the perspective of the institution. The artists aim to go beyond the idea of infographics and create a collective diary that has a poetic and artistic value, not just a documentary one. The material developed by the artists can be enriched by giving it an interpretation and an operational/processual meaning. 

On this occasion, the intention is to: proceed with research and selection of materials; develop a method; collect and comment on selections of textual and visual material; gather technical and operational information, interviews to establish a technical, historical, institutional, and poetic development.

Through this laboratory, a series of poetic stratifications of reading textual content and images will be collected, but also related metadata, technical data and/or narratives beyond what is immediately visible.

The laboratory will be an ongoing process, and will not end on November 12. The collected material will be subsequently worked on and expanded by the two artists with the help of Institutions and the AG team, and a new exhibition and/or publication will be developed.

The laboratory setting will remain visible during the ‘On Waters’ exhibition.

Photographer and filmmaker for over twenty years,  Armin Linke has documented how humanity uses technology and knowledge to transform the earth’s surface to adapt it to its needs. With a collective approach alongside other creatives, researchers, and scientists, the narratives of his work expand into multiple discourses. His works have been exhibited internationally. He won the special prize at the 2004 Venice Biennale, and in 2019 he received the Kubus.Sparda Art Prize. He is currently a guest professor at ISIA in Urbino and an artist in residence at KHI in Florence - MPI.

Giulia Bruno's artistic and photographic research focuses primarily on issues of identity, technology, language, architecture, and the contradictions that arise in the interaction between these areas. As a film director, she is interested in artificial languages and the languages that have conveyed culture and human resources for centuries, with a particular interest in their preservation and transformation to preserve communication and knowledge. Her works have been presented internationally. Her short film "Capital" received the 1st prize at Visioni Italiane 2015. In 2018, her work was selected in the Future Greats of ArtReview. She has collaborated for many years with Armin Linke.

Location: 

Church of Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Fondamenta Cannaregio, 910, 30121 Venice (VE)

With the support of:

Ca' Foscari, DVRI, MUHAI

Scientific Committee: 

Carlo Santagiustina, Costanza Sartoris, Luc Steels, Massimo Warglien

Organizing Committee: 

Marco Cosmo, Giulia Saya, Erica Villa

Partner institutions:
VERITAS, Municipality: High Water Damage Compensation Office 2019, Civil Protection, CNR ISMAR.