STRATIGRAFIE OPERATIVE

Curatorial text by Costanza Sartoris

Stratigrafie operative: a cyclical flow in dialogue with the tide

Those who experienced firsthand the dramatic events of the night of November 12, 2019 in Venice remember the power of the wind with the strong gusts of rain, the incessant sound of the sirens announcing the high tide, and the lagoon growing out of proportion, swallowing up the city's shores and alleys. However, the image that has most remained imprinted in the community's collective memory of that event is the iconic photograph of the stranded boat, which found itself biased on the Riva degli Schiavoni once the tide had receded. A reminder of the power of water when it rises uncontrolled, a material and spectral trace of its violent passage.

Aiming to deepen and add meaning to images that are seemingly aesthetically devoid and often relegated to mere documentation of the events to which they refer, the group involved the Fire Department, Civil Defense, VERITAS, CNR Ismar, and the Municipality of Venice to identify materials that could offer an novel vision of the aqua granda of 2019. In November 2022, the collective held a workshop in the context of the exhibition Sulle Acque at the Chiesa delle Penitenti organized by AquaGranda. In that occasion, Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke dialogued with representatives of some of the Venetian institutions involved, who re-read through their own professional experience and personal memories a series of technical images they had used for logistical purposes. This way the documentary images took on additional meanings supported by explanatory narratives and annotations born out of the intimate dialogue created with the artists. This collegial process of rereading and reinterpretation of material used primarily for operational purposes is at the heart of the poetics of Giulia Bruno, Armin Linke and Lorenzo Mason, since it actualizes contemporary technical-scientific aesthetics as the bearer of cultural values strongly linked to the collective imagination.

Combining the three different lines of research of the members of the collective, respectively language understood as a technological tool, photography as an expression of an epoch, and graphics as a means of narrative experimentation, Stratigrafie Operative reactivates the memory related to the operational knowledge for the management of the emergency caused by the exceptional tide of 2019 through multiple layers. Just as the tide does not reach a single peak, but cyclically every six hours rises and in the next six it falls, the exceptional tide of 2019 submerged the city of Venice in multiple waves and for multiple days requiring continuous monitoring and work by technical personnel to manage the emergency. These offer parallels to the narrative process embodied by the work, which reactivates the collective memory and imagination with respect to the event in a cyclical way, in waves. The chosen images work on multiple levels that intersect known knowledge with technical and specialized narratives, where the point of view of those managing an emergency plan returns to the community. The chosen medium, a ferry boat, is a material emblem of this return to the community, as it embodies the everyday movements of those who inhabit and traverse the space of the city.

Moving between the canals, the artwork Stratigrafie Operative brings back the innumerable and multifaceted levels of interpretation that certain images trigger in the individual person. There, the gesturality of the annotations enters into dialogue with the image itself, transforming the document into a complex work. Like pictorial strokes, the annotations are superimposed on the known, becoming the material traces of a further narrative, able to offer a deviation from the primary meaning the image may have. A collective process that from a symbolic dialogue re-enters the intimate and material everydayness of fruition, always partial, never complete. The artwork-boat itself is in fact impossible to grasp in its entirety on a visual level: from the shore as a floating monument it tells certain stories, while on the inside it opens up other ones. A double narrative level that from panorama gathers to the intimacy of the space of the public vehicle and vice versa. A series of cross-references and returns with respect to that collective imaginary that continues to remain imprinted in all the people who traverse the history and fragility of the city of Venice: a cyclical flow in dialogue with the tide.