On the eve of the opening day of the Venice Biennale, on May 23, the Zattere embankment in the Dorsoduro quarter was inundated, and the canal della Giudecca had nothing to do with it. It's just here that this evening, literally a stone's throw from each other, two exhibitions opened at once, to which bohemians from all over the world rushed in a powerful stream. One was shown by the V-A-C Foundation - the same one on whose initiative Renzo Piano is transforming the Moscow hydroelectric power station-2 into a museum of contemporary art (at the same time the project was presented at the exhibition). And the second was represented by the Emilio and Annabianchi Vedov Foundation - and it was already entirely devoted to the work of Renzo Piano.
Moreover, starting right from the doorway - from the very space of Spazio Vedova: exactly 10 years ago, it was according to Piano's project that a beautiful example of industrial architecture of the 15th century turned into an exhibition hall with an innovative system of showing art to the viewer. To keep the brick walls intact with the patterns of deeply ingrained salt, the architect came up with a ceiling-mounted structure that not only holds giant canvases (and most of them in the Emilio Vedov collection), but also moves them along a given trajectory. “It turned the traditional visual scheme of the interaction of works of art with the viewer upside down,” says exhibition curator and director of the Vedova Foundation Fabrizio Gazzari. “I created a museum - a machine for stimulating feelings and emotional exploration,” Piano himself wrote at the time. They had a long-standing friendship with Emilio, but in 2006 the artist left untimely, and this project became a kind of epitaph for Renzo, in which he put all the reverent respect for the ideas that excited his friend during his lifetime. The Vedova Foundation paid back a hundredfold for this, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the renovated salt warehouses with yet another revolution of consciousness - this time with regard to architectural exhibitions.
There are no layouts, no ink sketches, no printed drawings, no static photographs or even installations in the traditional sense of the word. There are no shelves with colorful catalogs and books. There is nothing that we are used to seeing at architectural exhibitions. Having started exhibiting architectural projects for the first time, the curators of “Renzo Piano. Progetti d'acqua approached them as objects of contemporary art. And in art, the absence of walls, showcases and other structures has become plus or minus the norm. The exhibited object and space act as a united front, art, as it were, fills it with itself, and the viewer no longer studies a single exhibit, but plunges into the environment formed by this exhibit.
So all the salt is in the salt warehouses. Or rather, in those exceptional opportunities that they provide - to build a "mise-en-scene" that affects all senses and levels of emotions. In terms of the completeness and variety of projects presented by various architects at the main venues of the Venice Biennale, Piano's exposition can only be compared with that of Peter Zumthor. Zumthor surprises with the richness of the palette of expressive means in prototyping - but Piano still definitely wins.
Feelings, like waves, roll in layers - light, sounds, images. Likewise, in layers, eight floating transparent screens float over the visitor. Everything is in constant motion, there is no special route, everyone has a unique experience of passing through the layered strata. The first impression is that you are somewhere under water: the hall is dark, the musical accompaniment clearly breaks up into drops and splashes, the images flicker and distort. The underwater world is full of life: on the floor there are moving projections of sea stars, outlandish snakes, caterpillars and even birds. On the screens, each of which simultaneously displays eight multi-format animated stories (four on both sides), the familiar features of Renzo Piano's projects are finally beginning to emerge.
There are sixteen of them in total, and for each the most diverse content has been selected - formally, all the same sketches, floor plans and photographs. But they do not look like that: sketches appear in the air, as if drawn by an invisible hand; reportage photos from the construction site and after its completion are fused into dynamic "gifs"; Due to the special processing filter, the drawings seem to be a mirage about to disappear.
But the most fascinating are the gradually recognizable and perceived connections of real buildings (although in Spazio Vedova they are rather surreal) with their prototypes: a starfish is a “bouquet” of cranes in the reconstructed port of Genoa; the bird is the spreading wings of the airport in Osaka, the snake is the ribbon of the Usibuka Bridge (also in Japan), the caterpillar is the "segmented" mobile pavilion of IBM.
“Progetti d'acqua” in Italian means “water projects”, but images are sometimes related to water, not buildings: the Pompidou Center in Paris is a steam engine, the Shard skyscraper in London is a shard of ice.
Both of Renzo's Venetian projects are directly related to Vedova: one is the Spazio Vedova space itself, and the second is the set design for the musical tragedy “Prometheus” by Luigi Nono, which premiered at the 1983 Music Biennale, in the former church of San Lorenzo. It was then that Emilio Vedova and Renzo Piano met: the artist was entrusted with the lighting design, and the architect designed a huge wooden ship-ark as a decoration. After Venice, the performance, along with all its components, went to Milan's La Scala, and more than 30 years later, Nono's music, skillfully reworked by Tomasso Leddy, formed the basis of the “sound landscape” of Piano's solo exhibition and so organically supplemented the already vibrant world. created by an architect. “I continue to insist - and in this I am not alone - that Venice / water / movement / openness are exactly the words that describe your spaces,” wrote Emilio Vedova to Renzo in 1999. "They are full of endless resonance." And after such a really resonant statement as the exhibition “Renzo Piano. Progetti d'acqua”, Emilio Vedova will definitely not be alone in his opinion.
The exhibition is open until November 25
Venice, Zattere 266, Magazzino del Sale, from 10.30 to 18.00 except Monday and Saturday
