VENICE - From April 6 2018, the Event Pavilion presents Greetings from Venice, a site-specific installation by the Italian artist Elisabetta Di Maggio, curated by Chiara Bertola. After the great public acclaim received by Fabrizio Plessi’s work Under Water and by Loris Cecchini’s installation Waterbones, the area devoted to different cultural events — located in DFS’s new lifestyle department store in the heart of Venezia — is back to contemporary art with an evocative and intimate installation, in which the suggestive and hypnotic beauty of the artist's manual dexterity intertwines with reflections on time and the nature of relationships.
After enchanting the public with the exhibition Almost Transparent Nature at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia during the last Venice Biennale, Elisabetta Di Maggio returns to Venice with an engaging and poetic new project that talks about the flow of time, the links between places and people and the value of memory.
In Greetings from Venice, the artist drew inspiration from the Byzantine patterns of the floor of St. Mark’s Basilica and the main Venetian palazzi, whose elegant and sinuous weaves reproduce an ideal network that connects together experiences, steps, encounters and silences. The artist does so by concealing the solid presence of mosaic blocks by means of ephemeral tiles, which carry with them that same concept of time: one hundred thousand postage stamps, all used and coming from every part of the world. The artist divided them up by their origin and colour and arranged them to form this unusual conceptual map that suddenly appears before our very eyes. The work was done with the help of the students from Marco Polo High School in Venice, just like in an authentic “medieval workshop”.
Works of art, flowers and queens of every colour and from every country are linked together by lines that the artist studied and structured in advance exploring the idea of a "fake ruin", upon which she drew a complex and extraordinary new form and meaning. An “imaginary mosaic” is now located at the Fontego dei Tedeschi, which was the home of the Central Post Office for all Venetians back in the 1900s (before it was adapted for its present purpose and after being used so long for trading and commerce back in the past): a place from which all kinds of missives were sent off to every corner of the globe for decades and are now back to create a link with St. Mark’s Basilica, the city’s most important symbol.
More than just a charming tourist location, Venice is a place that alters our sense of time and space, thereby affecting emotional life, the flow of time and the relationships between is inhabitants. Time, space, memory, relationships: Elisabetta Di Maggio, once again, plunges us into an aesthetic dimension of absolute refinement, a concrete expression of her patient experience and, above all, an engaging and exciting experience for those lucky enough to enjoy it.
This third exhibition confirms the DFS group’s intention to restore T Fondaco dei Tedeschi to its old vocation as a place where culture, trade, secular traditions and contemporaneity, local and international visitors all converge and intertwine.
The space, now reinterpreted by the arts, will continue to host cultural activities promoted by the T Fondaco dei Tedeschi: concerts, literary meetings, contemporary dance performances and video screenings organized in collaboration with Venice’s cultural institutions.
Open every day to the public free of charge, the Event Pavilion will host ‘Greetings from Venice’ by Elisabetta Di Maggio until 25th November 2018.