VENICE A flash mob city construction

VENICE A flash mob city construction Venice is like an appearance in the Laguna. It stands alone, as a perfect object, in a fragile but endless equilibrium between land and water. It emerges from the water as symbol of beautiful but temporary victory of soil over water. As long as the conquest is considered an event you might see Venice as an event in itself. The Redentore Festival, which dates back to the XVI century, makes clear how close the relationship between city construction, happenings and sacredness is. The Redentore began as a feast to give thanks for the end of the plague of 1576. Since then, a temporary votive bridge of barges from the Zattere to the Giudecca was built every year. Venetians didn’t surrender even when the conquest seemed impossible, like connecting these two shores too far apart one from another. They provided city with new soil, the temporary one. Conglomerated barges weren’t ment to act as a bridge, but in Venice events make everything become soil, as soil is the most precious gift they can have.

Here ground equals event, but event doesn’t necessarily need conventional ground.

More than being an event in itself, the city is also the place where number of international festivals take place, such as Carnevale, Biennale di Arte, Biennale di Architettura and Festival del Cinema. Those are single events, in Venice which is the perpetual event city, where life is concentrated in some spread points, that then become the only ”existing city”.

Considering this, we could imagine grouped blocks disposed by the geography or typology of events, make them become the new Venice, and settle new urban tissues with the same logic, in order to amplificate this structuring principle.

Even though it’s quite difficult to understand if Venice is real or not, does Venice really exist as residential city or is it just a place to experience as a permanent event? Is living in this city a kind of an event itself? Is event the only and right way of living in Venice?

The city is progressingly losing its everyday life dimension and people don’t desire to settle there, because of the absence of constructible and green areas and the intense traffic in canals. The shore seems to be the still untouched horizon of the city, except for the  boarding and offloading docks of the vaporetti. But could it be the place where  new Venice can board, the Venice of the everyday life event, the eVENtICE?

Conquering the see and reconquering the shores by means of floating pieces of Venice, which aggregate and disaggregate instantly and for few hours depending on the contingent and local necessities, reponds to the demand of new and flexible public and private spaces. A flash mob of citizens that use and administrate their own spaces as they want it.

VENtICE is the city where time and space are regulated by a perpetual calendar decided contemporary by citizens and tourist on one hand and local administration on the other at. The first ones, because they could express their exigencies in terms of public equipment such as sport fields or park by internet meetings, and by local administration, because it could use these modules to support the existing public equipments such as markets or theatres.