It is a project promoted by a dedicated foundation and brought to life in a joint effort Marsilio Art e Giorgio Cini Foundation which symbolically and continuously have knotted the threads of the lost experience of House of the Three Oci which for a long time in Venice was synonymous with theimperfect art.
The new reality will also be able to count on the support – for research projects – of the paint giant San Marco Group (Venetian company with a turnover of 100 million euros, 300 employees worldwide born in Marcòn – the emphasis strictly on the finish – in the province on the mainland) and the Venice Foundationthe institution of banking origin which had been the main supporter of the photocentric project of the Tre Oci and which found itself having to put its accounts back on track with the sale for 7 million euros of the beautiful Giudecca palace at Breggruen Institute Say Los Angeles.
Ugo Mulas, Eugenio Montale, 1970 | © Heirs Ugo Mulas | All rights reserved | Courtesy Ugo Mulas Archive Milan Lia Rumma Gallery Milan Naples
A speech that deserves a small digression. This of the Tre Oci was a much discussed sale in the lagoon and caused by the false start of the museum project strongly desired by the Venice Foundation which aimed to create the house of the twentieth century – theM9 of Mestre – but that with over 110 million euros of investments for the construction on the mainland a few steps from Piazza Ferretto of a colossal as for now empty exhibition space still lacking an identity has risked going belly up. Today the M9 is in the hands of the former rector of Ca’Foscari and professor of computer science at the Venetian university Michael Bugliesi who as president of the foundation is trying to give a soul to this cathedral in the desert, hopefully making it a crossover pole between the university and the world of art, following the vein of the STEM disciplines rather than yet another, however useless, location to rent for improbable corporate events that you really don’t feel the need for.
We said that The Stanze della Fotografia bring photography back to the center of the Venetian scene. And the departure we witnessed last Wednesday 28 March when the space was unveiled to the Venetian beau monde and to many guests who had specially arrived in Venice, seems to have had light under the best auspices.
First of all, the spaces are really large and spread over 1,850 square meters on two floors in the Sala del Convitto of the Cini Foundation, accessible on the north-east facing side of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and are the result of a precious as well as “tactical” work of restoration and rearrangement entrusted to the Pedron / La Tegola Architects Studio and thanks to the collaboration with the La Fenice Theater which helped to design the very clever system of movable walls, on the model of the theatrical wings, which will allow you to easily give shape to the various settings that may become necessary and which will complement the beautiful bookshop – pecunia non olet – designed by the studio Retail Design by Paolo Lucchetta.
Hugh Mulas, New York, 1965 | © Heirs Ugo Mulas | All rights reserved | Courtesy Ugo Mulas Archive Milan Lia Rumma Gallery Milan Naples
Marsilius’ chieftain and son of the late Caesar, Luca De Michelishas in concert with John Bazolipresident of the Cini Foundation, wanted to entrust the artistic direction to the talented and gifted with innate gifts of ubiquity precisely in continuity with the Tre Oci Denis Curti which in fact immediately set up a truly interesting exhibition program for the debut of The Photography Rooms with a colossal and beautiful exhibition: Hugh Mulas. The photographic operationcurated by Curti together with Alberto Salvadori, which will be open until 6 August 2023. The exhibition, which was born on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Brescian photographer, presents around 300 images, archival documents, and for the first time an important selection of shots vintage never exhibited before. The selection of “American” images is splendid with some truly memorable New York portraits.
Another exhibition, smaller but equally important is the one hosted on the second level of the Photography Rooms: Venice is another world which stages a selection of 60 photographs by Alessandra Chemolloliminal architectures of a city always in perennial balance between perfection and decay, which rightly open with a beautiful dedication “to those who will come after us” signed in 1969 by another great Venetian who no longer exists, Joseph Mazzariol.
And that seems to be a good omen for the future of this project and for this city. A new, different, alive future.
So congratulations to the actors of this new reality.
And a sincere invitation to the readers of ARTE.it to take the time to go and discover these brand new Rooms of Photography. It’s worth it.
Dedicated to those who will come after us
Ancient Venetians invented, day after day, their life and their city; those of today live from their city as from an inherited asset, using it in the easiest and least inventive way: in other words, they risk consuming it.
If they continue to use Venice as an object to show on certain occasions, they will lose it as a living and therefore civilly expressive organism in order to have in exchange a restored, inert and embalmed monument, concluded in its form of tourist ruin, which will be exactly the opposite of Venice .
(Giuseppe Mazzariol, in Louis Kahn. A project for Venice. Lotus n.6, 1969)
Alessandra Chemollo, Palazzo Ducale, glimpse of the Loggia Foscara, seen from the Basilica of San Marco, 03.23.2022 | Courtesy Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Municipality of Venice and the Lagoon