Palazzo Fortuny

The Palazzo Fortuny Museum is as idiosyncratic a space as you will ever find. It's one of those 'pinch yourself' experiences and it seems to connect to Venice in a strong way: design, collecting, the private Palazzo, a whiff of the illusive, and a peep into the ivory tower of bygone days. Judy Millar's Berlin - based gallerist Hamish Morison recommended the Palazzo Fortuny to me. He didn't tell me much about it—just that he visits it nearly every time he comes to Venice.

 

The six-month exhibition In-Finitum, currently showing there for the Biennale, is part of a trilogy of exhibitions by curators Axel Vervoodt and Daniela Ferreti. The back cover of the list of works states that 'the mysterious and mythical spaces' of the Palazzo Fortuny represent a 'natural habitat for the exhibition. Its structure and atmosphere—still so strongly influenced by Fortuny's investigative, creative and genial spirit—perfectly suit the unknown and unknowable that runs through In-finitum. Indeed the 'unknown' is very present in the Palazzo Fortuny. There are several dark annexes (in one we found an extremely exciting James Turrell light installation) and many dim corners where there could well be artworks that are never seen and other hidden objects. While I was there, I wasn't so aware of the theme of the exhibition itself; it's the discovery of this art/object 'habitat' that is so compelling.

Exterior of the Palazzo. The Moorish influence is strong.

You make your way across creaking floors and up a series of staircases: the curious collection of objects, theatre tools, tapestries, paintings, lights, furniture and tiny photographs spans four (and possibly five) floors. There are unfinished sculptures and strange studies of human muscle, set in rough stone, which are laid out like medical specimens on solid library tables. One cabinet combines two Escher lithographs with two spherical ivory 'polyhedrons' from Germany by an anonymous craftsman. It is these purely aesthetic combinations that make the Museum so intriguing. It is personal too. In the same cabinet there is a bust of Fortuny's grandfather. I continue to drift through, passing from a design for a theatre backdrop contained in a box, to a Bronze Bastet cat from Egypt's XXVIth dynasty and on to an Alexander Calder painting—mobile which plays a shadow on one of Fortuny's hung textiles.

John Gerard, Sentry (Kit Carson, Colorado), 2008

There are also some cracking works of recent years. I really enjoyed this video work by John Gerrard, fastidiously presented on a clean white bench. He creates works in real-time 3D, a type of graphics used in gaming. An oil derrick machine continuously pumps oil in an empty landscape somewhere in the mid west. The encircling 360-degree camera pans give it a slightly menacing air—as if the machine is under surveillance.

 

There are layers of fabrics in front of which paintings seem be suspended in mid-air, and a number of long sofas generously adorned with decorative cushions. We made good use of these. Fortuny's famous lamps create a very soft light. It is very dark and murky in areas, but the third floor is where you come up for air. It has cream walls and much more natural light, and the works on this floor seem to be united by minimalism and light colours. The journey through the museum has lots of contrasts.

For me it is like finding your way into the backdoor of a surrealist painting—or at least entering the studio of Dali or Magritte. It is also like a Joseph Cornell assemblage—on a large scale. On the second floor you can gaze into Mariano Fortuny's library through a window. It's filled with textiles, samples and tools.

 

Marzia, an Italian I work with at the Fondazione Buziol, tells me she went to an exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny some years back as a high school student, an exhibition on 'arte deco'. I start to realise the museum is a wonderful permanent Venetian set where many exhibitions and themes can be staged.

 

A section of the list of works (which is a rough architectural plan and the only guide on offer) makes me smile:

13. Antoni Tapies (1923), Texture negra amb taques blanques, 1959
14. Scholar's Rock, China, 20th Century
15. Adam Fuss, For Allegra, 2009
16. Dragon, from the collection of Mariano Fortuny. Wood. (Unfortunately I seemed to have missed this object)
17. Bill Viola, Bodies of Light, 2006

Where else would that line-up materialise?

A little about Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949), Spanish fashion designer and inventor

Fortuny was born to an artistic family in Spain. His father, a genre painter, died when Fortuny was three years old and his mother moved the family first to Paris, and then in 1889 to Venice. It was in Paris, the story goes, that Fortuny copied a Velasquez at the age of 9 and was sent to study with a famous painter. Apparently the young Fortuny also frequented the studio of Rodin.

In Venice, the family's house on the Grand Canal became a busy meeting place for artists and writers. Not only did Fortuny paint and etch and practice all of the traditional methods for studying art, he also practiced music, photography, architecture and set design. He had a close relationship with the composer Richard Wagner, and received his first theatre commission in 1889, designing the set and costumes for 'The Mikado'.

 

He opened his couture house in 1906 and continued until 1946. Today he is famous for a number of things, including the finely pleated Delphos gown, a gown based on the ancient Grecian style; new methods of textile dying and printing on fabrics; the Fortuny cyclorama dome, a stage lighting innovation that could be used to create lighting effects such as a bright sky or a faint dusk; and the Fortuny diffuser lamp, for domestic lighting. We found these in one of the Fortuny shops in Venice and took some photos (double click on the photos for a larger view).

  

Leafing through my guide (I'm now home in Wellington), I realise I have missed the 'attic' floor. I recall walking though four floors, but must have not found a way up to this final space, where according to the floor plan, there is pottery from Thailand and Japan, amongst twenty other paintings.

A window on the third floor. Views are rare in Venice.

Ice cream

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the more day-to-day aspects of living here in Venice for some time and have had a perfect topic in mind since just before Marnie arrived. It was to be along the lines of ‘Marnie and Robyn visit the best gelateria in town’, except that for whatever reason we haven’t made it to the yummy ice cream shop, so that one will have to wait. A certain NZ visitor to Venice (you know who you are) was quite particular about experiencing the finest cuisine which included ice cream, and it was suggested that I could take Marnie there too when she arrived.

 
Gelateria near our apartment – surprisingly quiet

In the meantime however, that particular gelateria (‘Igloo’ between San Marco and the Accademia Bridge) got me thinking about ice cream in general and of the sheer number of ice cream places there are in this town. It would be a slight exaggeration to say you stumble across their bright, gooey consistency every 100 metres, but not too wildly off the mark in the tourist-Mecca we traverse everyday between our apartment and the two venues.

 

Flava

It’s hard to say exactly what singles out a particularly gastronomical gelato experience from sight alone but in discussing the matter yesterday we came to the conclusion that the appearance of a fine gelato is less lurid in colour (i.e. more natural) and has less or no additional elements sprawled on top such as crazy biscuit things or lashings of chocolate syrup.

Ice cream bliss

Thoughts of plentiful gelaterie (plural of gelateria), led me to consider other multiples on view to keep the tourists happy and spending (or jaded and closed walleted). Two contenders of equal merit are the glass shops and the mask shops, my knowledge of which is limited to window glancing. Here I will let images speak as they have an immediacy that language might not quite do justice.

 

Glass treats

Stallion

Penguins

Masks

 

The Dali clocks…

Sun

Mondays are quiet days for the Venice Biennale. With most of the pavilions and collateral events around Venice closed, and the Giardini also shut for the day, it is an excuse to explore some other parts of Venice and the surrounding areas.

 

Mint magic

In the name of relaxing, Robyn and I took a short vaparetto ride to Lido, an 11km long sand bar that is a popular holiday spot for many Venetians. It also has roads, with cars and buses to boot, a strange sight after a few weeks in Venice.

 

Beach huts

We hired (Dutch!) bikes and rode straight to the far end of the island to a beautiful stretch of beach. After a few hours sitting under mint and white striped umbrellas, psyching ourselves up to go in to the water – a New Zealand habit that is pretty redundant on the Adriatic coast – we had a lovely swim, and a ride along the south side of the island, and past a series of hand-made beach-side huts.

Back to the hustle of San Marco.

“Wheel waa aaa yew doo eng eer?”

Two days ago I made my first trip to the Giardini. I think, like most first-timers, I was really struck by the architecture of each, discrete national pavilion, with everything from neo-classical seriousness, graceful modernist walls of glass, domestically scaled spaces, and buildings that would have looked at home along the coastlines of the Coromandel or Golden Bay in the 1990s. The commissions for each pavilion are as diverse as the architectures that house them and I really got a sense that while some artists chose to ignore the building, there are others who either explicitly addressed the physical and ideological spaces of the architecture and the surrounding gardens, or attempted to create a conversation with the city of Venice.

The German Pavilion

Liam Gillick’s project for the German Pavilion, How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks, was a work I was looking forward to, partly because I have just read the recently published reader Meaning Liam Gillick (ed. Monika Szewczyk et al.), and I was interested to see how an artist who seems to continually problematise, and mobilise the relationship between the built and the ideological, would respond to the setting of the Giardini. Well, firstly, on the face of the towering, neo-classical building Gillick has fitted a curtain of coloured strips of plastic over the entrance door. Described as “like” the blinds used to keep insects out of a room, this curtain immediately called to my mind the similar rainbows that often separate the shop floor from the domestic spaces of corner dairies up and down New Zealand. Entering through a mundane swoop of soft plastic, I expected something at odds with the authority of the building, perhaps somewhere I could sit, have a cup of tea and put my feet up?

The Blinds

Inside, the building is comprised of one main room, with four interconnected rooms attached, all with incredibly high ceilings. There are no storage spaces, toilets or kitchen, and the only concession the building makes to the necessities of use is the occasional fire extinguisher and two emergency exits – also covered in plastic strips by Gillick. Humming, echoing and reverberating through the space (as if a formal speech is happening in one of the adjoining rooms) was a man’s voice, only occasionally audible, that is trying to tell a story. Running adjacent to the interior walls are a series of connected, double sided kitchen units arranged so they cut across and through the rooms of the pavilion. Although they are identifiable as kitchen units, they are devoid of any appliances, running water or fittings, bar three LED spotlights set into the timber above the bench space of each “kitchen.”

The Units

 

These kitchen structures appeared carefully made to me, but in the style of the mass-produced, pine kit-set packaged interiors that populate apartments all over Europe. In the space itself, the units took on a form of the sculptural, hovering between the modernist minimal, and the mass-produced lifestyle – echoing the once emancipatory efforts of both minimalism and, in contradistinction, the attempts in the early to mid 20^th Century to liberate women from traditional roles within the home (Maria Lind writes on the latter in her essay “Kitchens” published in Meaning Liam Gillick). Once I had negotiated my way between the rows of kitchens, a tabby cat perched on top of one of the units broke the repetition (someone of slightly taller stature than myself might have spotted the stuffed creature sooner!) With a scrunched copy of the speech transcription in its mouth, the tabby peered down, and seemed to me as positioned, as an exclamation mark might posit itself at the end of a sentence, like a comedic interruption that rendered a particular tone over my preceding experience.

The Kitchen Cat

Like much of Gillick’s work, any sense of meaning (if we can still talk of such things) involves chasing threads between what you find in the visual, and what is articulated in the written, spoken and performed. The echoed voice in the pavilion is incredibly hard to discern amidst the cavernous building and (I’m guessing) some added echo effects, so, turning to the transcription provided by the venue attendants, a story of the only talking cat in the world is told. This cat, presumably the one looking at me as I read, lives in an unnamed town and is cast by the community as prophet, ghost and wise feline, while cultivating depression, anxiety, boredom and snobbish ambivalence. In parts of the narrative, the cat is torn between the desires of its cat-ness, its all-knowing wisdom, and its need to be fed knowledge in order to fulfill the wishes of its visitors.

The Blinds

Within the narrative, the continuous demands on the cat to speak (despite its obvious talents in this area) are often uncomfortable, wrought with suspicion and misunderstandings, and the eventual story that is told by the cat to the children is only made possible through the stealing of the listeners breath – literally removing their ability to speak. For me, the figure of the speaking cat, the spoken narrative, and the kitchen unit forms are constructions that enable political, aesthetic and social questions to become at least fleetingly manifest. “Well, what are you doing here?”

To those who made it through my first – and, I promise, longest – post (like Liam Gillick, I have issues with ending things), there is more to come on the animal invasion of the 2009 Venice Biennale …

'What else could we talk about?'

It could be said that the work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (1963) deals with portraiture, albeit a portraiture of traces. For the most part her subjects are victims of a particular type of border violence stemming from extreme poverty and drug-related warfare as Mexico and North America face each other across an artificial divide. From initially exhibiting unwanted corpses or parts thereof, she has turned to collecting the bodies’ displacement, and particularly, in the case of the intervention in the Mexican pavilion De que otra cosa podriamos hablar? (What else could we talk about?), the blood and mud left behind after a series of murders.

Everyday at 4pm in a dilapidated palazzo (site of Mexico’s pavilion) near San Marco, the floors of the upstairs rooms are silently mopped with water containing small amounts of blood from some of north Mexico’s murder victims. The blood from the (cloth) mops is then recycled in an elaborate process. In the end room blood soaked cloths are hung to loosely fit between plaster mouldings and mingle with a portrait of a (also now deceased) European individual, while downstairs blood impregnated mud on large hanging canvases are kept moist.

 

Mopping ritual

 

 

Blood-soaked cloth

 

 

End room

 

Blood/mud canvases

 

Margolles’ work sits at the heated intersection of art and politics and between those who would argue that the commodification and instrumentalisation of art to serve other agendas limits its potential to affect any real change. With this work, and in particular a photograph in the exhibition’s accompanying brochure, Margolles makes connections between cause and effect in a way that would however, be inconceivable in a mainstream media account of the situation in Mexico. Margolles switches from collecting and recording the victim’s ends to almost quite literally hanging out the dirty washing on the perpetrator’s façade.

 

In April of this year, prior to the Biennale opening the artist staged an interventionist act whereby she attached two long vertical strips of blood-soaked cloth over the shutters of the boarded up American pavilion in the Giardini and photographed it. Apart from the execution of the initial act, the work exists in a physical presence only as this printed photograph creased with folds. It has an oddly powerfully calm in the face of the appalling reality in the artist’s home state of Sinaloa, north Mexico where violent death due to harsh, externally structured economic policies reached 5000 in 2008 (exhibition brochure).

 

Almost twenty years after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was swiftly moved through three governments in 1992, the results as predicted by human rights watchdogs such as Noam Chomsky have come to pass. “The effects in Mexico were particularly severe… Wages had declined sharply with the imposition of neoliberal programs in the 1980’s. That continued after NAFTA with a 24% decline in incomes for salaried workers and 40% for the self-employed…The minimum wage lost 50% of its purchasing power. …the number of people living in extreme poverty grew twice as fast as the population, and even those working in foreign-owned assembly plants lost purchasing power.”

Read more about Chompsky's talk called "A World Without War"

In ways comparable with Santiago Sierra and Artur Zmijewski there is a quality to this work that manages to avoid simply re-inscribing and presenting status quo values to the already converted. But whether knowledge can prompt action is another (and difficult to calculate) matter entirely.

'The End'

Occupying the palazzo next to Francis Upritchard’s Save Yourself in an uncanny instance of synchronicity, is the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End. It seems somehow fitting then, on entering the slightly tumble-down palazzo (which occasionally floods) that there is a strong sense of descent which goes beyond the physical. While low light, amplified water sounds from the canal and uneven stone floors contribute a certain amount, the rest is a result of a certain timelessness generated by Ragnar and Pall’s performance. A protracted boredom or not altogether unpleasant ennui ideally suited to the sinking, crumbling, flaking city.

 

 

The studio

 

 

Ragnar

 

Described as a ‘radical romantic’ (Carlo Sini), Ragnar will spend the entire length of the Biennale painting a portrait of Pall each day as he reads, listens to music, plays the guitar, drinks beer and smokes clad only in a pair of speedos. In homage to the time honoured tradition of the painter in their studio, Ragnar stands in front of an easel, Pall wherever he finds himself. On my second visit this happened to be lounging on the couch, a record on his chest surrounded by empty beer bottles. This would have to be the most, quite literally, laid back pavilion I’ve visited so far. Laid back in a knowing kind of way though and generous in the easy interactions it enables.

Artist and model

 

A theme running throughout Ragnar’s work is the investigation of the image or identity of the artist, whether it be the outmoded smock-wearing painter in the studio or an abstract expressionist painter in white coat, laconic-ferocious expression, cigarette drooping from his lip, which he enacted in his first year of art school. Acts of duration and touches of the absurd also make repeat appearances.

In addition to the artist-and-his-model performance there is a video and sound installation roving over five screens in a curtained off room to the side. In a similarly toned ennui, Ragnar and collaborator, musician David Thor Jonsson, encased in fur clothing, play various instruments on each screen, which feed into a type of folksy-country sound. Each scene is shot against clichéd, overly spectacular backdrops of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in deep snow. The two works exist together in a type of loop distanced by a series of binaries: one is manual the other on digital auto pilot; the height of summer against the depths of winter, but both evince a different strain of extreme.

 

 

In to the Rockies

 

Back in the main space, surrounded by fresh canvases stacked in a corner and completed works also either stacked or hung casually on the walls, Ragnar seems to be warding off the end through repetitive cycles and accumulation, as though this could stand in the face of the inevitable.

 

 

Two works

 

Leading out to the small pier

Giardini

It has been almost two weeks since I first whipped around the Giardini and Arsenale with Simon and Veronica. Yesterday returning for a more thorough investigation of the Giardini I started observing a few of the tell-tale signs of technological malaise and breakdown in several of the pavilions that people had warned me of. Some ominous black monitors for the most part with creative spelling on ad hoc signage.

On a similarly early and somewhat hazy stroll around the outside of the Giardini area I came across a kind of unwieldy balancing act comprising a standard-sized, rust-coloured shipping container sitting gingerly inside a rickety-looking boat made from roughly hewn logs. Because of its close proximity to the Giardini exit I suspected it might be part of the Biennale, but didn’t consider it further amongst all the other competing visuals at the time. Additional pieces of information such as an unfamiliar colourful flag and a painted logo ‘Capital Forwarding Solutions’ branded on the side were picked up on another visit. Then it wasn’t until chancing upon an article in a local magazine (cura. art magazine) that the mysteriously over laden boat come into a more focused view.

Djahazi

Union of Comoros flag

 

The simple, yet sturdy boat is called a djahazi and has been the main mode of sea transport in the Union of Comoros, an archipelago of three islands located between Madagascar and Mozambique, Africa and site of the recent and unfortunate plane crash. A young Italian artist Paolo W. Tamburella came across a photo of a djahazi online and intrigued, followed up his interest with a visit to the islands. Following discussion with some Comorian dock hands who agreed to collaborate with him they decided to repair and bring one djahazi to the Venice Biennale. Transportation involved the djahazi being bisected and squashed into, appropriately, a shipping container. Five Comorian men arrived two weeks before the opening to reassemble the boat and stayed for the Vernissage week to perform songs, dances and generally interact with the public.

More images and videos of the Camoros Island pavillion

 

Those who have been to the Giardini will be familiar with the different styles of pavilion architecture which ranges from the austerely neo-classical to modernist to quirky hodgepodge. By and large they are all solid, permanent and resilient structures. Outside the metal railings encircling the Giardini, beyond even the remit of the land this boat with its heavy burden lies tethered between four posts and utterly at the mercy of the waves and wake of passenger, cargo and pleasure crafts both small and epically large (massive cruise ships).

 

 

 

The djahazi were banned by the Comorian government following significant international investment by Comoro Gulf Holdings into a deep water port project and a $180 million tourist village. Described as a Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC), Comoros is dependent on tourism in addition to exports of vanilla, cloves, ylang ylang, coconut, bananas, copra, tapioca. Ironically some of this information has been sourced from an online company called eStandardsForum which “collects and disseminates publicly available information on countries’ compliance with international best practices for managing economies and financial systems”. With certain adjustments it is then possible for all countries to “attract significant levels of domestic and foreign private investment”. 

More information about Comoros on eStandardsForum

 

In some ways the symbolism is overwhelmingly obvious – a container branded with ‘Capital Forwarding Solutions’ weighs in its first world privileges against a third world anachronism. The outlawed djahazi supplanted by larger vessels now negotiating the Comorian port of Moroni rimmed with luxurious tourist accommodation. The capital has been forwarded, along the customary routes however and this little reconstructed outlaw stays afloat just, waiting, knocking on the door.

A stand-out work: 'The Feast of Trimalchio' by AES+F

After traipsing through the vastness of the Arsenale and then finding the right boat, I finally got to Russian art collective AES+F’s mind-boggling new multi-channel video The Feast of Trimalchio. It's a fantasia on many themes familiar to me as a visitor to Venice: religious iconography, luxury consumer goods, tourism and exoticism. AES+F construct a very particular type of ‘vacation’. The backdrop is a tropical island resort where a series of maids, cleaners and other service-people are at the beck and call of the holidayers—usually always clad in white: linen dresses, tennis whites, Lacoste sneakers and chinos. Sometimes these relationships are turned around: a holiday-maker becomes a waiter or an elegant blonde matron is ritualistically dressed in a traditional Thai outfit. While the work represents a visual typhoon of cultural stereotypes, bodies and costumes are often interchanged.

 

All the usual 'Club Med' activities are on site – squash, golf, massage, aerobics and gyms. Children are looked after elsewhere. Platters of fruit and rows of reclining chairs are arranged in perfect symmetry. The holiday-makers exercise en masse; rows of treadmills extend into the horizon. Like in other AES+F works, there are often classical and religious motifs and references. A weights machine stands in for the cross – capturing the focus of the new religious zeal: ourselves.

 

 

The gentle, balletic movements repeated by the figures in quasi-loop form evoke the serene calm and knife-edge professionalism of travel providers like Singapore airlines. Bodies and cultural costumes are given over to the almighty brand. Identical suitcases on wheels become part of the dance-like sequences. This digital choreographing of travel and leisure shows just how commodified the experience has become.

 

A young, chisel-featured man in a wheelchair floats by, escorted by his quasi-Nubian carers who submissively put him on a drip. Mortality is an obvious theme here; but this could also be a comment on the appearance of medical tourism and society’s increasing appetite for extreme physical self-improvement.

 

The massive cruise ships that glide to and from Venice, dwarfing the buildings and creating an ever-changing skyline, are just as ubiquitous in the work – sliding into shot against a soundtrack of Verdi’s Aida. Golf balls fly by, whirling in concentric circles like a cyclone or mushroom cloud. There is also a Buddhist temple on a catamaran. This work is completely and utterly wild and I’d love to sit amongst it many more times.

 

This work is in an exhibition called Unconditional Love which is near the Arsenale. I think there might be a way of getting to it from the back streets of Castello, (without entering the Arsenale), however I'm not entirely sure. These are the quirks of the Biennale experience: finding your way around is tough - in fact so is finding a good map. For those on their way, I recommend the British Council map and ArtWorld magazine's small pocket sized guide.

Fondazione Claudio Buziol

Francis attended a gathering at the Fondazione Claudio Buziol last year and was offered the three front rooms of their premises for her Biennale exhibitions. It’s a stunning venue for the exhibtion and a very nice place for us to work, so I thought I’d take a closer look at the building and the Foundation’s programme. Housed in one floor of the Palazzo Mangili Valmanara, the Fondazione Claudio Buziol is primarily interested in design, and the promotion of a series of social, educational and cultural activities - either directly or in collaboration with other institutions, organisations and schools.

The palazzo was once owned by Joseph Smith, British consul at Venice from 1744–1760. Joseph was a patron of artists, most notably Canaletto, banker to the British community at Venice and a major draw on the British Grand Tour. I like to imagine people arriving by boat at the Canal side entrance to the palazzo and ascending to the very rooms we sit in for parties.


 

Various rooms at the Buziol used as offices by staff and artists and designers in residence

Claudio Buziol
Claudio Buziol was founder of the Fashion Box group, an established collection of companies which manufacture and distribute the Replay fashion brands in over 50 countries in

Europe, the Middle East, Asia, America and Africa. In 2005 Claudio Buziol sadly passed away at the early age of 47, and the foundation Claudio Buziol was established in 2006 to pursue his projects in the areas of design, education and training.

From the Fondazione Claudio Buziol website:
The Foundation’s main aims are at a glance expressed through the project’s name, “Fast Forward”, a name that, playing with the same technical terminology which is behind the name “Replay”, indicates a particular attention towards youth creativity. More specifically, the Foundation - either giving direct support or through collaborations with other institutions - supports initiatives and projects that assist young people in their education and training.

 

Spanish filmmaker and artist Carlos Casas

Currently in residence is Spanish filmmaker and artist Carlos Casas, who is researching the concept of parades. He has created a channel on YouTube to feature a selection of films based on his research, and to pose a series of questions:
Can a film be a parade? Is there a Film-parade? Can a Film be a parade of images?

Check out his YouTube channel to see more of this project led by Andrea Lissoni and Carlos Casas.

 
Federica Pezzato who co-ordinates programmes at the Foundation.

This coming Wednesday I’m attending a free lecture at the Foundation by Scott Schuman, creator of the popular ‘The Satorialist’ blog. He is here for the Foundation’s ‘Pause Summer workshops’ with designers and artists including Schuman, and also Lanzini, Martino Gramper, Abake , Zaunka and El Ultimo Grito. Check out the Fondazione Claudio Buziol website for more details.
Fondazione Claudio Buziol are also hosting a series of summer music evenings, a design competition, as well as their regular activities like promoting young designers on T-shirts for the Replay fashion brand.
 
The rooms that Save Yourself is installed in are exquisite. Even the radiators are decorative.


The marble sections of wall are in fact painted surfaces, a tromp l’oeil effect of coloured marble. 

    

At a glance the walls appear to be wallpapered but when you get up close you notice they are in fact silk. A fine layer of gauze in the same hue protects the silks from dust: a practical form of conservation which is almost invisible to the eye. One room is dark red, one cream and the third boasts golden yellow stripes.

Many visitors in the yellow-striped room have looked up and commented on the connection between the dancers in the ceiling painting and the cluster of figures in this room who are in various poses of motion. It is not just the burnished mirrors which Francis draws into her exhibition.

The rooms overlook the Grand Canal so we can pop out onto the balcony for a bit of fresh air if we need some respite from the hot weather

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NZ Schools' Poster Competition

We asked students around the country what they would do if they had the opportunity to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale.

The best answers won each student and their art class a signed Francis Upritchard poster. Congratulations to the senior photography class at Kelston Girls' College, and their teacher, Rachel.

Here are their ideas:

Mary says:
"My current work reflects issues around growing up in a religious Samoan household in New Zealand.

Taualai says:
"I would submit work that reflects New Zealander's obsession with the 'national game' rugby.

Lavinia says:
"My current work reflects New Zealand teenage girls obsession with 'fashion'