Venise Verticale, Fulvio Orsenigo

“If it is not uncommon for the small internal canals of the city to be so calm that the water becomes a mirror, it would be pure fantasy to imagine that the same is true of the wider canals: the waters are disturbed by navigation – even in the deepest hours of the night -, beaten by the wind or the sea breeze, moved again by the delicate undertow generated by the moon, coming to be lost on the banks which push the wave back, once again, in a continuous movement. In the Serenissima, a breath moves and never stops: sometimes slow and calm like that of a sleeper, sometimes syncopated and panting like a hurried walker. Unpredictable is the suspension of this breath… a suspension that stops everything, in which we ourselves, suspended, contemplate, stunned, the unthinkable image that then appears before our eyes. But immediately the eye – that architect who shapes and composes space – imposes its vision, its implacable reading grid: the backstage of a suspended Venice offered by the waters of the canal appears. It is through these vertical faults, these fractures in the urban fabric, that we are offered the image of a Venice suspended between two black abysses.” Fulvio Orsenigo