Edited by: Riccardo Del Fabbro – Architecture Department Editor – riccardo.delfabbro@positive-magazine.com
Proofreading: Bianca Baroni
Photos: The Ship
Where: Venice, Italy
Artworks: “urban spontaneity VS. city’s representation”
Move, Stop, Restart.
“Venice is not a city but a representation of a city” *
This is one of the most famous quotes from the pamphlet by Régis Debray entitled “Contre Venise”.
One of the most heated debates in Venice concerns the way this city is detaching from its inhabitants to enjoy fully its tourists and the “global law”.
The city is transformed into a museum, a theme park; public spaces are unlikely to be more public.
This risks to bring little by little to the disintegration of urban spontaneity in favor of what can be considered “planned”, “commercial”, “ticket-experienced.”
Something moves.
IT’S a WHEEL!
This wheel is moving through Venice, and once at “rest”, it becomes a public and exhibition space that brings together 90 independent publications relating to architecture.
This wheel is called ARCHIZINES Venice and is the brainchild of a collective formed by IUAV architectural student called The Ship.
ARCHIZINES Venice is a provocative challenge to the city, its “museification” and to the more and more pronounced “private background” that grips the “Serenissima”.
“The itinerant pavilion, recalling the ancient venetian tradition of temporary structures located in the public space, aims to break with its journey the boundaries between the designated spaces for culture and the public realm of Venice. In opposition to a city prone to mass- tourism commercialisation Archizines Venezia tries to define an alternative practice, taking advantage from the unique urban condition of Venice in order to use the streets and squares as the main stages for the exhibition.” **
Something stops.
Once steady this wheel becomes a container of information with the exhibition of its “alternative” publications, but mainly a container for the ideas and a crossfire between those who want to participate.
We find ourselves in front of a grocery store that sells fresh fruits, and when the number of clients increases, when the rumor spreads, everyone becomes fond of fresh fruit.
This concept shifted to the dialogue between people can only bring to new and fresh ideas in order to animate and integrate the life and the public space in Venice.
Something restarts.
The wheel restarts, bringing with it new questions to answer, leaving on his route stimulants screenplays waiting to find the right actors to come to life.
What doesn’t have to leave again is the awareness gained-in those who have participated to this ephemeral symposium- and it has to settle and multiply, spread and spill from a strictly architectural scope, in order to involve any other sector.
Venice has to become a WHEELNESS CENTER.
* Contre Venise, Régis Debray, Gallimard, Paris, 1995
** The Ship presents Archizines Venezia, Press Release, 2013
