VENEZIA

Venice is a fish. Watch it from above, looks like a sole fish. Lying on the bottom. On the map, the bridge connecting the mainland looks a line. Venice seems to have hooked the fishhook. Is linked with a double-line: binary steel and asphalt’s strip. But this is happened only after an hundred years. We were fear that Venice could change idea and restart. We connected to the lagoon to avoid his departure for ever. We said to the others that we did it for protection, because after years of mooring, isn’t able to swim! Could capture it immediately, could be taken from a Japanese whaling, could show it in a Disnayland’s Aquarium. The truth is that we can’t live without her.

We are jealous and violent for protect her. We have done more that link to the mainland: we have nailed to the bottom!

Venice looks like this. The nails are not of iron but of wood. They are very big, from two to ten meters of lenght, with a diameter of twenty, thirty centimeter. They are planted in the mud of bottom.

This building that we see, the architectures of marble, brick houses can not be built on the mud, could sink. In wich way we can do it? The venetians have put a lot of poles in the lagoon. Under the Basilica della Salute have put one hundred thousand posts, also under the Ponte di Rialto for contain the pressure of stone arch. The Basilica di San Marco is based on platforms of oak, supported by a palafitte of elm. The logs come from Cadore’s Woods, on the Venetian Alps. They were brought down floating in the river, on the Piave. There are larch, elms, oaks, alders and pines.

The Serenissima has been very careful at this heritage woods, for the strict laws that protect the forests.

Trees headfirst upside down, planted with a kind of anvil. Pulled up with the pulley. I saw when i was child. I heard the songs of the workers with the percussions of machinery, very high.

The logs are mineralized through the mud, that enveloped them in its protective sheath, and prevented rot on contact with oxygen: in apnea for centuries, the wood is changed almost like stone.

“You’re walking on endless forest upside down, you’re walking on incredible backwards woodland. It seems the invention of a poor science fiction writer, instead is true. I describe what happening to your body in Venice, starting from the feet.”

Tiziano Scarpa, Venezia è un pesce, Feltrinelli, 2003.

The project born like is born Venice. For the Serenissima is time to give birth a new island. A particular island…that give space at something very important for the venetian culture. Maybe devote a Carnival Museum and impact photos exhibition isn’t a bad idea. The tourists would discover something new and who is gone could come back for a confront with a different Venice, young.

Positioned under the belly, almost completely submerged in the lagoon, with his form that resembles the head of a fish, it turns out slowly alone from intersect lines started from the extremes of Piazza San Marco, Punta della Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore’s island.

Try to believe.