The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every other week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon. Here we go, Number 40:

Reach for the Crown

Ciao Ragazzi, before we get to the game, here’s a little anecdote from last night here on the Lido. At the Astra Cinema, Sala 1, shortly after eight. The commercials before the movie are still playing. Then Zendaya comes on. Archival footage of her first appearances and roles, with a voice-over explaining how special she is. Not much pathos. It’s cool. And then the image freezes, with the subtitle “Grazie” on the screen. But she hasn’t said “thank you” yet. It quickly becomes clear that the freeze is a glitch—that there are technical problems in the cinema.

The house lights are still on, and people are continuing to come in. At the back of the auditorium are two restrooms, where there’s a lot of activity. But the screen is still frozen. Zendaya. Grazie. Some of the audience members turn around, but no one gets up to tell the theater staff. It’s a strange atmosphere. How long would people stay seated without doing anything? No one is whistling or shouting. It seems completely normal. Grazie. That’s just how it is. Following Pep Guardiola’s rejection, Andrea Pirlo’s appointment as Italy’s national team coach also fell through this afternoon. Pirlo had too close ties to Russia—to oligarchs, Pirlo’s club United FC Dubai is owned by Cyprus based Sergey Aleksandrovich Lomakin and Pirlo being the ambassador of Russian betting company Fonbet. And he’d just been in Moscow. Grazie.
People are still coming in. It’s 8:18 p.m., and the movie is supposed to start in two minutes. The screen has been frozen for about 5 minutes. But it’s not uncomfortable. It’s more like we’re sitting on a train and Zendaya is up front, saying “Thank you” to put our minds at ease. Stay seated. We’ll get there eventually. Even if everything’s burning outside. Grazie. Then suddenly the clip starts playing again. Zendaya says “Thank you”. And it’s a Rolex commercial! All right. Brilliant. No glitch. The best commercial ever! About six minutes of freeze frame. Thank you for waiting. Being and Time. Thanks for everything, Rolex. “Reach for the Crown.” The movie starts right on time at 8:20 p.m. And Zendaya plays the goddess Athena. It isn’t worth mentioning further. (Except for the dog Argos, maybe.) Let’s get to the game:

It’s not a tourist souvenir version of Monopoly with Venice landmarks substituted for Mayfair, Rue de la Paix, or Schlossallee. Unfortunately. It’s a historical reimagining of the Venetian Republic at the height of its power. A map of the Mediterranean world. A bit boring. Reality more interesting. Real estate. Property Drama. Speculation and gentrification. Here this seems far away. The currency is Matapan: the silver coin of the Venetian Republic. San Marco with ₥400 is the most expensive, the Arsenale you get for ₥350. Treviso and Belluno are only ₥60. What? Thessaloniki or Athens ₥300 each. How much is Greenland? Train stations are bridges.
A nice thing about it is that the chance cards are the Sentenze del Consiglio dei X— judgments handed down by the secret police. The feared and utterly undemocratic Council of Ten could pass sentences without a trial. In secret. And based on anonymous denunciations. Not bad for a chance card.
Even nicer: the tax squares are either the Dazio sul Sale, the tax from salt trade that built Venice’s empire. OR the Tassa Suntuaria—the Venetian LUXURY LAWS. Regulating displays of wealth. Regulating what merchants could wear or spend. WE NEED THAT NOW! Not only for merchants. The number of courses at banquets were limited, the jewelry women were allowed to wear, the fabrics used in men’s clothing. And gondolas weren’t allowed to be painted however one pleased. In 1562, a law mandated that they all had to be black. Just as they are today. Thank goodness for the law! Just imagine!
All to prevent the rich from flaunting their wealth. There were several sumptuary laws throughout Europe. How great would that be today? If yachts were smaller, and cars too! Fewer plastic surgeries, smaller weddings, no private jets. And most of the super-rich don’t even pay taxes. They pollute the air and water and put everyone in a bad mood. They undermine democracies. Just to own even more. At our expense, at the expense of the general public. And then they fly off to Jeffrey Epstein’s island or meet in dark conspiracy circles with right-wing and far-right politicians—organized by Peter Thiel—to discuss World War III or the Antichrist. All of this shows that money and property do not make you happy at all. Or smart. At least not a lot of money. Only Jeff Bezos seems to be happy because of it. Just not any smarter. Or cooler. Roll both dice. Move clockwise. What happens depends on where you land.

Which palazzi are still up for sale? Palazzo Labia, where the Le Bal oriental, hosted by Carlos de Beistegui, took place in 1951. A massive and incredibly lavish social event. It launched the career of Pierre Cardin— born near Treviso, in San Biagio di Callalta. He designed about 30 of the costumes, Christian Dior and Salvador Dalí designed each other’s. Cecil Beaton took photos. A surreal society reminiscent of Venetian life before the fall of the Republic at the end of the 18th century. 1951! The year a fashion show in Florence first put Italy on the map as a fashion power. From then on, its rise was unstoppable. Then, in 1964, RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster, purchased the Palazzo Labia at an auction for 350 million lire (roughly €3.5 million) Parties were still held there from time to time. Then, in 2008, they wanted to get rid of it, for €60 million—but to no avail. The ballroom, with its frescoes by Tiepolo, must be breathtaking: Antony and Cleopatra. Meanwhile, the agency KPMG, which is marketing it on behalf of RAI for €40 million, has produced a teaser highlighting its potential as a “hospitality property.” Great. Another luxury hotel. Just what our game needs.

What about the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which was built in 1508 on the left bank north of the Rialto Bridge after its predecessor burned down? The German merchants, the Tedeschi, formed the most important foreign trading community in Venice. Titian and Giorgione created the exterior frescoes in 1508, of which almost nothing remains today. Fragments can be found in the Ca’ d’Oro. The building served as a post office for much of the 20th century—for 70 years. In 2008, it was sold to the Benetton family for approximately 55 million euros. This sparked controversy, and in 2012, they offered Venice an additional 6 million euros in exchange for unrestricted building permits. However, the Venetian public protested. In 2016, it was leased to the DFS Group, a Hong Kong-based luxury retailer controlled by LVMH under the leadership of Bernard Arnault, and converted into a luxury shopping center by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. Rooftop terrace, spa. It has been closed since May 2025, with no clear plans for the future. The rooftop terrace is no longer accessible. Locals used the building as a shortcut between Campo San Bartolomeo and the Rialto Bridge. That, too, is closed.

Or what about the two connected buildings on the left bank, the Palazzo and Palazzetto Barbarigo, a rare example of a 19th-century mosaic facade on a Venetian exterior, depicting Titian presenting works to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and other scenes. They were added in 1887 and are not loved by everyone. Too bright, too restored-looking. According to the Italian Anti-Corruption Foundation, the palazzo is currently owned by Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor who was dismissed from the Munich Philharmonic in March 2022. Two weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. And now artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Does anyone want the cursed palazzo? Palazzo Dario, dating from the 15th century, painted by Claude Monet, praised by John Ruskin. It has been on the market for 21 million euros since 2024. Built in the 1480s, it features a magnificent facade, multicolored marble inlays, circular ornamentation, and asymmetrical windows. A fusion of Venetian Gothic and Renaissance styles. However, the list of tragic ends is long: Dario’s son-in-law committed suicide, ruined by the estate. Radon Beurdeley bought it and went bankrupt; Kit Lambert, manager of The Who, bought it, fell down the stairs, and died of a brain hemorrhage in 1981; financier Fabrizio Ferrari bought it, his sister was killed in a car accident and he went bankrupt; Woody Allen almost bought it. American businessman Charles Briggs bought it in 1993; his partner was killed in California shortly after, and Briggs sold it. It’s still on the market. Buy it!

Even though it isn’t located on the Grand Canal, we mustn’t forget the Palazzo Poerio Papadopoli near Piazzale Roma. Dating back to the 16th century, it was sold in 2017 by the administration of then-Mayor Luigi Brugnaro as part of a package deal to sell municipal real estate to Singaporean Oxley developer Ching Chiat Kwong. For 10.8 million euros—reportedly 4 million euros below the actual appraised value of 14 million. Allegedly, City Councilman Renato Boraso, who is currently in jail, was paid a bribe of 73,000 euros. It never opened as a hotel. Construction never began. The corruption investigations make that impossible. Ching is trying to sell and leave Venice. “It’s impossible to make investments here.” Hahaha! As part of the deal, he also acquired the Palazzo Donà on Campo Santa Maria Formosa, a 16th-century building in Castello, and converted it into the 5-star hotel Palazzo Maria Formosa. Then sold it to the Italian real estate fund Blue SGR for 18 million.
But the real issue was 41 hectares of land called Pili at the entrance to the Mestre-Venice Bridge. Overlooking the lagoon. Brugnaro purchased the property in 2006—before he became mayor—for 5 million from the Italian government. He was the sole bidder. The land was cheap because it was heavily contaminated by nearby Marghera. He transferred it to his company Porta di Venezia, which was placed in a blind trust in 2015 when he became mayor. The Pili area was then designated as a potential site for an intermodal transportation hub and a new sports arena, and the property was earmarked for development. Its value rose from 5 million to approximately 150 million euros. In 2016, Brugnaro met with Ching Chiat Kwong and proposed the Pili for a 1.3-billion-euro construction project. Including a hotel overlooking the lagoon, a shopping center, several office towers, a luxury retirement community, lagoon family homes, a marina with clubhouse, and a 10,000-seat sports arena for Brugnaro’s own basketball team, Reyer Venezia.
Prosecutors accuse Brugnaro, his chief of staff Morris Ceron, and deputy chief of staff Derek Donadini of agreeing with Ching to double the building density on the land and approve all necessary urban planning changes in exchange for 150 million. As well as to sell the 41 hectares for 85 million. The deal fell through in 2018, when Ching discovered how heavily contaminated the site actually was.
The palazzi were offered to Ching as an incentive to establish him as a credible investor. Prior to the Pili deal. The public prosecutor’s office has charged Brugnaro and 33 others. The trial has not yet taken place. Brugnaro is not mayor anymore. The investigation is known as “Palude”, which means “swamp.”

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris is set partly in a screening room, partly on the island of Capri. Odyssey as film, film as Odyssey. Fritz Lang playing himself directing the Odyssey reminds us: “Gods have not created man, man has created God.” Zendaya Athena. Grazie. Stay seated. We’ll get there eventually. Maybe tomorrow, Saturday. On the Lido. Sandro Gallo 47A, 6:30 to 10pm with a show by Matteo Stocco. Or tonight, with Lukas Kubina at 6pm on Radio Ombra. Lukas and Matteo are definitely in our Unlikely Council of Ten. Writing the LUXURY LAWS for the 21st century. Ciao fioi, a presto!

The shifting ground

Munich is exactly the same distance from the Alps as Venice. On a clear day, you can see the mountains from both cities. The best time is between January and March, when the tops are covered in snow. The only difference is that Munich is north of the Alps and Venice is down below. On the Adriatic Sea. The train ride takes a little over 6 hours and is beautiful. Via the Brenner Pass. Or via Villach, then it takes about an hour more.
In early May 1911, the writer Gustav von Aschenbach walked through the English Garden in Munich to the North Cemetery, where he saw a strange man dressed in hiking gear. The man looked him straight in the eye with a combative gaze. Death. Aschenbach, however, interpreted this as a budding desire to travel and set off for Venice. Probably via Villach on the night train to Trieste. About 10 to 12 hours. Just as Thomas Mann had done in May 1911—the author of the novella Death in Venice.

…after Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. It was also the most important port. James Joyce was there at the time von Aschenbach and Mann were passing through the city; he was working on The Dubliners and had just begun Ulysses. And his English student, Italo Svevo, was in the midst of conceiving his masterpiece, Zeno Cosini.
From Trieste, von Aschenbach and Mann took the ship to Venice. Thomas with his wife Katja and his brother Heinrich. Gustav was alone. On the island of Brioni, the Manns had an altercation with a Habsburg countess, and on May 18—the day of Gustav Mahler’s death—they set off for the Hotel des Bains.

Aschenbach reached the Lido at night, in a black gondola. And once again, he encountered death. In 1971, Luchino Visconti adapted Mann’s novella for the screen and made the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony famous. And Aschenbach was now a composer, no longer a writer.

Thomas Mann lived in Munich until he went into exile in 1933. Katja came from a very wealthy Munich family. Mann himself was from Lübeck, way up north. Like Venice, Munich has a film festival. It’s also a cheerful one, albeit smaller and less significant. But it’s growing. And just as the Lido is at the end of August and beginning of September, Munich at the end of June is a city of swimmers, laid-back, festive, proud, and smart. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have a clean river that’s running right through the city. Where anyone can jump in, wade in, swim, spend the day. It doesn’t cost a cent. Collective public space.
This year’s opening film in Munich was Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski. Golden Palm for directing at Cannes. And the man playing Thomas Mann is Hanns Zischler. Hanns with two n’s. Mann with two n’s. In German, Mann simply means man. A man named Man.

Fatherland is set in 1949. Shortly after WWII, Thomas Mann is awarded the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, West Germany. But he also travels to East Germany, to Weimar. The city of Goethe. At the invitation of the Russians and the GDR. A divided Germany. It was Pawlikowski’s decision to show only this journey. A brilliant decision. The film is in black and white. Quite square and often very beautiful. With few shots. Few cuts. Pleasantly short. Sometimes it’s a road movie. Great actors. Sandra Hüller, August Diehl, Devid Striesow. What does the film tell us? That as a curious, bright human being, you can’t be a Nazi? Nice. But still an ambivalent, stubborn, vain guy? Mann was hard to pin down. Ever-changing. Thomas Mann is a German hero! In a way…
It’s more of a personal film than a political one. And it’s Hanns Zischler who plays the role with such great confidence that not a single scene is embarrassing. Not easy. The most beautiful one is the first press conference, where it becomes clear once again that the Nazis weren’t simply gone in 1949. They were everywhere. And the Americans and the Russians, of course, were the victors and made that clear. But Mann had changed after Death in Venice, after the Nobel Prize in 1929, after two world wars, and years in exile. While still in Germany in 1930, Thomas Mann delivered the German Address in Berlin, in which he described Nazism with the calm fury of someone who had already seen the whole thing: “Riesenwelle exzentrischer Barbarei und primitiv-massendemokratischer Jahrmarktsrohheit” — “a giant wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive mass-democratic fairground coarseness.” And: “Mass convulsion, fairground bells, hallelujah, and dervish-like repetition of monotonous slogans until everyone has foam at the mouth.” 1930!
Two years later in Vienna, October 1932 and two months before Hitler became Chancellor, Mann aligns himself with the socialist project:
“Socialism is nothing other than the dutiful decision to no longer bury one’s head in the sand of metaphysical things when faced with the most urgent demands of material, social, collective life — but instead to take the side of those who want to give the earth a human meaning.” Einen Menschensinn. A human sense. A human meaning. A bourgeois socialist. The man who lived in a grand villa in Munich with servants and wrote ten-volume novels. But who understood, with complete clarity, that the individual cultivated self was meaningless if it didn’t turn toward collective life. In February 1933 Thomas Mann left Munich for good.

And in 1949 he refused to choose between West and East, refused to let either Germany claim him alone. Which Fatherland? Hanns in the ruins, refusing.
Zischler is now 78. He has been photographing since 1971. At the moment he showes five decades of his work in Munich at the Hotel Olympic on Hans-Sachs-Straße, — Fotografien 1971–2025. Venice at the entrance: Venedig nachts. Venedig Wassertaxi. Venedig Gondoliere. Mostly Lochbilder — pinhole photographs. A wooden box with a hole. No lens, no viewfinder. Exposures of ninety seconds to several hours depending on the light. The Grand Canal palaces smear sideways across the frame as if the buildings themselves are moving. Time accumulated.

A life preserver on an orange railing, pale water behind. It looks like the lagoon. It says “Venedig” on the price list. But it is Staten Island. And there is a shadow of a man at the railing — he walked through the frame during the exposure and didn’t stay long enough to be more than a shadow. The trace. Hanns?

In 1983, Hanns Zischler translated Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie into German, together with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. They translated Derrida!!!!
On a typewriter. In Berlin, Knesebeckstraße. Sentence by sentence. Over half a year. When they got stuck they played billiards. They also had to translate Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues — because Derrida devotes a third of the Grammatologie to deconstructing it. So the German reader received Rousseau’s argument and its demolition simultaneously. The ursprüngliche Spur. The originary trace — and its deconstruction, arriving together. Not a trace left by something that was once present — but a trace that was always already a trace.

In a beautiful interview from 2025, in jungle.world, Zischler describes Derrida’s philosophical method as something invigorating. Alive. Something that accompanied him: “Die philosophische Skepsis Derridas ist etwas Belebendes. Was mich immer begleitet hat, ist der shifting ground.” The shifting ground. He said it in English, inside the German sentence. As if German didn’t quite have the word for what Derrida did to the earth beneath your feet. Zischler has spent his life on shifting ground. He wrote Kafka geht ins Kino, in 1995, the best book about cinema and literature that isn’t about either. In Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Hanns plays Hans — a document forger, a maker of false identities, a man who fabricates traces for a living. One n missing. A great film about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, when the city had just arrived in the Modern Age only to be immediately overtaken by it.
And in Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 neuf zéro — made in 1991, the year after reunification — Zischler plays Count Zelten, an agent of the BND, the West-German secret service. A man whose profession is the management of traces. Zischler also translated Godard. Histoire(s) du cinéma. Of course.
Munich itself has its own buried history of resistance. After WWI, in 1919, for a few weeks, it was the Münchner Räterepublik — the Munich Soviet Republic. Artists, writers, anarchists in government. Kurt Eisner shot dead. Gustav Landauer beaten to death in prison. The fascist Freikorps crushing it with extraordinary violence. And four years later, 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch — Hitler’s first attempt, in the city Thomas Mann was living in.

There is a beautiful show at Lothringer 13 Halle right now. Through July 31st, Curated by Kalas Liebfried: ANTIFASCISM: NOW

A long-term project, starting in Munich and moving to Athens, Belgrade, Białystok, Bucharest, Istanbul, Lviv, Prishtina, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Thessaloniki, Tirana, Zagreb — ending in Aachen in 2028. Many cities where antifascism is not an abstract concept. Fairground bells, hallelujah. Go and see the show. And go down to the basement to see Stanislava Pinchuk’s piece. It’s really worth it.

Thomas Mann stayed at the Hotel des Bains regularly from 1912 to 1934. The clock on the facade stopped at 10:38 — probably around 2010, when the hotel closed. Somebody tried to build private homes in the park. The furniture was stolen. It’s a sad ruin.
Death in Venice was written on the eve of World War I, at the peak and the culmination of 19th-century Décadence literature. 1911 was the year of the Agadir Crisis, when French troops in Morocco led to the dispatch of a German gunboat. The Germans demanded “territorial compensation.” France took over Morocco as a protectorate in exchange for German Cameroon from the French Congo. And for England, this was an “unbearable humiliation”… etc.
In 1914, WWI broke out. At that time, Thomas Mann was still in favor of a war, but that soon changed. With The Magic Mountain, his sanatorium novel from 1924, Mann had finally bid farewell to the sympathy with death.
Infected by overripe strawberries he had bought while wandering through the alleys of Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach dies of cholera. As he watches Tadzio one last time from his deck chair on the beach, it seems if the handsome boy is smiling and waving at him from afar, pointing with his other hand out toward the open sea. “And, as so often, he set out to follow him.”
Ciao fioi, a presto! With #40. Forty!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every other week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon. Here we go, Number 38:

10 a.m., still alive.

On the morning of September 13, 2022, Jean-Luc Godard watched 13 minutes of his last film, Drôles de Guerres, went to his desk, smoked his last cigar, and called a taxi. It took him to the assisted suicide facility. He had asked his press secretary to make it very clear that he was not ill. Not depressed, but simply exhausted.
At 10 a.m., the world learned of Godard’s suicide from the newspaper Libération. At 10 a.m.—the time of his appointment, but not the time he ingested the toxic substance. This means Jean-Luc Godard was still alive. Exhausted. And deliberately out of sync.
The story of Godard’s death concludes Stanley Schtinter’s book Last Movies. A collection of the films that famous people saw–“during, just before, or close to death”– last in their lives. Franz Kafka watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid in 1924. Charlie Chaplin himself seeing Kubrick’s Barry Lindon in 1977. John Dillinger was shot in 1934 leaving the cinema after Manhattan Melodrama. Rainer Werner Fassbinder watching Bette Davis in 20,000 years in Sing Sing by Michael Curtiz from 1932. Then the stroke. In 1982. Bette Davis allegedly watched the 1931 film Waterloo Bridge—in which she starred—at the 1989 San Sebastián Film Festival. In secret.

The Portuguese Pavilion has no permanent home in the Giardini. It drifts. This year the location is the Fondaco Marcello. Right on the Grand Canal. The name comes from the Arabic funduq — a merchant warehouse. This years’ curators are Ana Baliza and Ricardo Nicolau, flanked by Marco Bene, also ‘the archivest-in-attendance.’
And they invited Schtinter to perform his book. Last Monday, he showed excerpts from the films, up to the moment when the person died. French writer and singer Boris Vian five minutes into I Spit on Your Graves, from 1959. An adaptation of one of Vian’s books. But an adaptation without permission. Which enraged Vian so much that he had a heart attack at the movie theater. Vian’s friend Louis Malle, the film director, subsequently confirmed that movies can kill. It’s all described very beautifully in Last Movies. In Schtinter’s own words: “Through this approach, a parallel map of recent history—Screen Time emerges, stretching back almost to the inception of cinema itself…”
And just as the last films shape this cinematic dérive, the exhibition shapes the performance. Because RedSkyFalls by Alexandre Estrela is alive. It’s a living, seismic operating system. Connected in real time to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center, reacting to every earthquake with a magnitude of over 4.5 on the Richter scale—no matter where on Earth it occurs. Tokyo, Lima, Taipei, Los Angeles. And no matter when! Soon, before… Quite often actually. And Estrela hasn’t just translated this into sound, but whenever a quake comes in, the small, glowing creatures in the exhibition freeze. They’re called Réplicas. And they’re composed of a fly’s heartbeat. Or of a fish larva’s tail. A rat’s whisker. They freeze in fear. A loud noise, sounding like heavy guitars, can be heard. For about 10–15 seconds. Schtinter takes a walk around the projection wall. Reset. Return to baseline. At first, you think it’s a man-made loop. But it’s the earth that feeds back. We have to accept it. Schtinter continues with Sergio Leone, “the most Italian film director” who died in 1989. His last film: I Want to Live, by Robert Wise from 1958. The best fragment of the night, a film noir based on the true story of the prostitute Barbara Graham, who was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison for murder. Susan Hayward won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Bloody Babs. We watch Estrela’s Réplicas sense the next earthquake. Threshold vibrations. They’re always too early. Just as a catfish perceives changes in the water’s electric field BEFORE a quake strikes. Because charged particles released from the rock under stress dissolve in the water. Infra-small signs, detectable hours before the event. A brief moment of paralysis. We synchronize. The seismic data stream doesn’t arrive all at once. Then Schtinter continues. We find ourselves in the gap between signal and catastrophe.

RedSkyFalls is probably getting the most feedback right now from where the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults meet. Anyone who has ever driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas has crossed the Cajon Pass, where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates are constantly grinding against each other. 24 hours a day. Seven days a week. Because they are not in sync. The plates wedge against each other, building up enormous tension. Underground. Over hundreds of miles. And when this tension is released, the earth quakes. Heavy guitars. And by the way: Right now, the tension is higher than it has ever been in the last thousand years. Hollywood, Silicon Valley…? Arizona could soon be right on the seashore—who knows? Arizona Bay.

Survey on an S Wave is the title of a parallel programme curated by Marco Bene intervening Alexandre Estrela’s show with a Portable Seismic Archive. 126+ works about collapse, ruins, endings. Quite a few of them come from the collection of New York gallerist Emily Harvey, which she established here in Venice in the 1990s. Like No. 105–John Giorno’s Life is a Killer. And the Seismic Archive includes Ralph Rumney’s The Leaning Tower of Venice from 1957, No. 102—that dérive through Venice for the Situationist International, which we covered in Issue #09 of the Unlikely Guide.

At the end of the evening, Stanley Schtinter reaches Godard. Announcement of the Film ‘Phony Wars’ (1st shoot). As if there would be a second shoot. Schtinter shows a long part and the Réplicas plop and tock, and popp. The heavy guitars. It comes all together. Drôles de Guerres ends on Israel and Palestine. Not here. Here it ends on Carlotta and Saint Laurent. The tension. The gap. 10 a.m.. Still alive.

Fifty years earlier, there had already been reports that Godard had died—on June 9, 1971. In a way, the story made sense: Godard was the most rebellious of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, destined to shine brightly and die young. And his films had always dealt with suicide and/or death. But in June ’71, he was riding fast with his motorcycle through Paris and hit a delivery van. And was immediately taken to an intensive care unit. In the end, he outlived everyone else from the Nouvelle Vague. Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Marker, Varda.
The last of the Mohicans, as he called himself.

After his motorcycle accident, Godard retreated with Anne-Marie Miéville to the small Swiss town of Rolle on the northern shore of Lake Geneva. He built himself a video and sound studio and was now able to make films in a completely different way. And to explore them. With Timecode. Which brings sound and image together when recorded separately. Now Godard was able to freeze time, slow it down, or speed it up. Putting things in sync which don’t belong. The Ton-Bild-Schere. Adding titles, give new meaning. Something that previously could only be done with scissors and paper—he could now do with film.
And his second first film was the result: Sauve qui Peut, [la vie] in 1980, Slow Motion in English. His best film. Sorry. An incredible film. When Godard presented it on Dick Cavett’s show in America in 1980, he speaks of his characters, saying they have no bitterness. Just like him.
He has “no anguish."

JLG: “For the character and for myself as a director of the movie, there was no complaint, feeling of complaining about something.”
And Cavett somehow misunderstands this as having nothing left to lose:
Cavett: “Because the characters aren’t complaining, they must have given up.”
JLG: “No, they’re just coping with reality, but no complaining about nothing.”

Godard was in a good mood. It all started with those fantastic lectures in Canada, 1978: Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. And when his film Prènom Carmen was in competition at the 40th Venice Mostra in 1983, there are quite a few photos of him smiling and looking completely relaxed.

There are also these images of him playing tennis on the Lido. Excellent style! The grounds belonged to the Hotel Excelsior back then. In the 1930s, there were even tennis courts right on the beach. Today it’s called Tennis Club Venezia, a place with a nice restaurant and access to the beach that is, anyway, the most beautiful club in the world. In fact, it was voted one of the 100 most beautiful.

There are several studies suggesting that Tennis is the healthiest sport—also for the brain. One that extends life. Godard lived to be 91. All his life he wanted to play Roland Garros. “And win” he told L'Équipe in 2001. John McEnroe was his favourite player. Who else?

Jean-Luc Godard won the Golden Lion with Prénom Carmen at the Lido. And not even the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni also got one (for-lifetime-achievement) could put him in a bad mood. In the Jury were among others: Bernardo Bertolucci (President), Peter Handke, Nagisa Ōshima, Agnès Varda, and Bob Rafelson. What a line-up! Rafelson! Second to last in Stanley Schtinter’s book. He died shortly before Godard. Rafelson’s last film? The Joker?

In Prénom Carmen, Godard plays Carmen’s (Maruschka Detmers) uncle, a musician and filmmaker who is himself somehow out of sync. Very funny! And confined to a psychiatric clinic. Everyone in the film keeps trying to get in sync with one another: Carmen, the terrorist, with Uncle Jean. The uncle with his niece; Joseph, the bank security guard, with Carmen. They wedge against each other, building up tension. Chaos and sensuality. The cries of the seagulls and Beethoven’s strings. It has an incredible stylistic density. And energy. Godard’s best film. Really! At one point, Uncle Jeannot says: “What do these young people actually want? They didn’t invent the blue jeans nor the cigarette.”

The day after Schtinter’s performance Portugal’s President António José Seguro visited the pavilion. He is a socialist and won the election in February with 66%, the highest in Portuguese history, defeating a far-right candidate. And he had spent ten years farming before returning to politics. Later the president met with his Italian colleague Sergio Mattarella and King Felipe VI of Spain, on San Giorgio Maggiore. ‘Rethinking Work in the Age of AI:…” In the gap between signal and catastrophe, Christine Lagarde joined them as guest speaker.

The Portuguese Pavillon: San Marco 3415. Tue- Sun, 10am - 6pm, Free entry. Ciao fioi, a presto! With #39. Play some tennis! And don’t complain!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every other week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon. Here we go, Number 37:

The Liver & Authenticity

I. The Compass. We’re becoming real pigeon experts. Following Issue 17: Le puttane di San Marco, here’s the latest: Pigeons navigate not with their brains. Not with their eyes. Not with some mysterious crystal in the beak, as previously assumed. They navigate with their liver. More precisely: with iron-rich macrophages in the liver — immune cells that break down old red blood cells and accumulate so much iron in the process that they become superparamagnetic. They respond to the Earth’s magnetic field. They sit next to nerve fibres. The information travels upward. Feeds back. The pigeon knows where home is. It has always known. Just not the way we thought. Carrier pigeons with damaged macrophages couldn’t find their way home on cloudy days. Only when the sun was shining. The liver, it turns out, is not a secondary organ. It is the instrument.

Richard Burton, the great Welsh actor, — one of the hellraisers, the one who married Elizabeth Taylor at least twice, who read everything, who had a voice like a cathedral, who was a man like a cathedral— supposedly said he wanted his liver buried with the same ceremony as the rest of him!! It sounds very true. The liver is where everything accumulates. The iron. The booze. The memory. The sense of direction: Home.

II. No Photos Please. Meanwhile in the Giardini: Pete, the gull from Issue 36, is now sitting on the roof of the Polish pavilion. Since Tuesday. Below him, anti-bird spikes run the length of the ledge — a long metal strip of tiny deterrents, installed carefully, expensively. No gulls! Please! Beatrice is standing on the opposite roof. The Niemeyer Brazilian one. Why did they move up? And still look down?
Now the Biennale has some technical difficulties. Like always. In September or October. And it seems like they’re running out of steam. Already! Okay, it’s a performance Biennale.
Belgium: “The performers are back in 3 weeks.”
Qatar: In the huge new Pavilion are a few kids watching videos. No cooking. No dialogue. No meeting. No performance. Bit sad, but expensive: Qatar.

Austria: The jet ski seems broken. The robot dog is not moving anymore. Under water. SEAWORLD DROWNED by Florentina Holzinger, which Pete gave 12 points in Issue 36, is still extraordinary — but feels more like a J.G.Ballard dystopia. Well, there is a Holzinger piece now at the Wiener Festwochen. ‘Pentecost Play’, over ten hours long! More boundaries are crossed, more taboos broken… For the audience: photo opportunities. And here? Looks like 2 or 3 female*performers had to stay. A naked tattooed man hanging in this Saturn thing. And the sleeping Venus, who makes her bed. Quite literally. And suddenly somebody says: “NO photographs!” What? Now? Here? Where, as we noted last time, people hold up their phones like a crucifix to lend moments their sacred quality. The Instagram Cathedral. Where the phone IS the witness, the record, the liver, the absolute proof that something happened. Something authentic. No! What do you mean? Is transgression becoming intellectual property? Hey Valie Export, what does it mean? Wasn’t the body supposed to be the document? Maybe this woman who told us not to take pictures was somebody who had nothing to do with all this? A trap? An artist? A religious zealot? Or all of the above?

By the way, there’s also this artist who, on certain days, scatters 100 rice grains made of gold on the gravel in front of the American Pavilion. Not all at once, but in batches. This leads to people who look relatively well-off getting down on all fours and digging through the dust with their bare hands. And they happily hug each other when someone finds a rice grain. The lady from the American Pavilion with the long coat, and a nice sign that says “Ask me about the art,” explains that while this has nothing to do with her Pavilion, it’s by an artist whose name she’s forgotten and who has an exhibition somewhere in Venice.
A brief ornithological note: pigeons do not perform. They do not need an audience.

III. The Flea Market. Spain and Finland are very nice surprises in the Giardini. Every wall of the Spanish pavilion covered floor to ceiling with postcards. Tens of thousands of them. From flea markets across Europe. And beyond. Ancient coins on red backgrounds, Egyptian shabti figures, Persian kittens, a card that simply says Glückauf! Ruhrgebiet in coal-black letters. The postcards are not manufactured for the occasion. They were already beautiful, already strange, already full of someone else’s idea of the world. A collective memory. Not curated intentionally. One enormous archive. Just accumulated. People here sit in the corners on small folding chairs. They are serene. They lean in close to find one postcard among thousands. Toy dolls in national costumes, medieval swords, mountains, more cats, Chinese bronze vessels. It feels like the most relaxed space at the Giardini.

In the Finland Pavilion the mood is also pretty serene. Very different though. It’s small. People sit on wooden benches like in a waiting room. Or a forest. Or next to a fitness trail. And between them large grey furry trolls or weather instruments. The giant grey wigs seem to perform. A post rock band from Finland? Who just play wind noises and dark minimal breathing sounds. Aeolian Suite, by Jenni Suronen. Beautiful title. Aeolian means wind-driven. The grey hair of the funny creatures moves when there is a breeze. The furry trolls respond to conditions. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s black hair on an elegant Riva-Boat. Aeolianation Conditioner. Sorry.

IV. The Sorrowful Map. There were high hopes that the yellow camp would lose and the red camp would win. But the center-right candidate, Simone Venturini, won by a surprisingly clear margin. Giorgia Meloni has reason to celebrate. The local elections were a test of public sentiment following her defeat in the justice referendum. But what the map also shows: almost everything on the mainland—Mestre, the suburbs, the industrial outskirts of the lagoon—is yellow. The historic island of Venice: red and pink. The Lido: mixed. That is the administrative hook. It’s all part of it. Mestre votes, and Mestre wins. And after 11 years, Venice gets a successor from the same party as Luigi Brugnaro—who has been under investigation for corruption since 2022, and whom the Venice Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested be brought to trial. Venturini was already a city councilor under Brugnaro.
Mestre has cheap hotels. Mestre benefits from mass tourism. And Mestre votes to protect this arrangement. Anyone who disagrees is a straniero—a foreigner. An outsider. Someone not from here. The curator of the 2024 Art Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa, a Brazilian, said about its beautiful title Foreigners Everywhere: “First of all, wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.”
Venice, the city that traded with Byzantium, with Alexandria, with the Silk Road. The city from which Marco Polo came. The most cosmopolitan city ever built, now governed by the votes of people who fear cosmopolitanism. And automatically, the entire leadership of the Biennale is composed of right-wing and far-right politicians. The new mayor, Simone Venturini, is now the vice president. Alberto Stefani, the relatively new president of the Veneto region and, just like the president of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a member of Matteo Salvini’s Lega party, is on the board of four. È triste, ragazzi.
Very different the pigeon: it doesn't navigate by who it thinks it is. It does not blame its existence on strangers. No, it navigates by iron in the liver. By something accumulated over time, something real, something that connects it to the actual magnetic field of the actual Earth. Not a story about the field. The field itself. Authenticity does not belong to the one who shouts the loudest that they are from here.

We recorded an Unlikely Talk with the wonderful Andrea Lissoni, the artistic director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. And it seems that the Haus der Kunst, much like the FC Bayern when searching for a coach, often has a great deal of luck (and, of course, skill) in finding its directors. In any case, with regard to the Biennale’s title, In Minor Keys, Lissoni reminded us of Mike Kelley’s book, Minor Histories. A magnificent collection of Kelley’s writings on his own work and his collaborations with Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Raymond Pettibon, and many others. Here, one can learn an incredible amount about authenticity, performance, politics, the uncanny, memories, writing itself, and art. And America. Ciao fioi, a presto! With #38. And take care of your liver!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every other week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon. Here we go, Number 36:

Frankensteining

We couldn’t find anywhere to vote. Mr. President? Do we have to call the Biennale? Landline? And if someone picks up, will they only speak Latin?
The official international jury had resigned collectively in the wake of protests against the Russian and Israeli pavilions. As well as counter-protests and threats to sue over the decision not to include the two countries in the competition for the prizes. The jury’s justification for the exclusion was that the heads of state of the two countries had been charged before the International Court of Justice. But the Biennale’s board then decided to hold the jury members personally liable. Once the jury had left, it was quickly decided that the audience should decide who would receive the prizes. In other words, us. But where? And how?
Then the answer. It isn’t the public that chooses the winner, but a nesting gulls couple. Yes, yes, they say that’s much more democratic and free than a jury consisting solely of women from all over the world. And also than the public, which is left-leaning and elitist anyway. Now it’s two local seagulls. Italian, white, and unbiased. The Israeli artist and the Russian curator welcomed the decision. The female gull, Beatrice, then goes right to work.

First Beatrice flies over the Swiss Pavilion and peeks through the skylights for a moment: Hetero is Coca-Cola, is politics and next door is Seminar. Suddenly, Beatrice feels Pepsi and flies over to Denmark across the street.
Things to Come—what a lovely title, thinks Beatrice. And learns that it comes from a 1936 science fiction film based on an idea by H. G. Wells. The film is about the collapse of civilization after a long world war and its reconstruction through science and technology. The Danish Pavilion is by artist Maja Malou Lyse and curator Chuz Martínez. In a future where pornography and technology have joined forces to ensure the survival of humanity—not of seagulls. Because men who watch a lot of porn increase their fertility. A contemporary study in Denmark among cryosperm donors found that VR headsets increased the total number of motile sperm by up to 50% during collection. “Wow”, Beatrice thinks, “this is about fertility. I can really relate to that.”

In between a brief look at seagulls: Gull pairs are extremely monogamous and often stay together for life. Some return to the same nesting site every year—apparently not Beatrice and Pete (two names we chose completely at random, just so no one calls them Hope and/or Happy). A seagull pair typically lays two to three eggs per breeding season. Both parents share the task of incubating the eggs and feeding the chicks. They can live up to 30 years; in the wild, they usually only reach half. In gulls, there is no sexual dimorphism, meaning there are no distinct differences in appearance between males and females.

Beatrice waddles into the large room on the right and finds herself facing three projections. Pornstars with enormous breasts, sometimes naked, sometimes in tiny bikinis, in tight uniforms and lab coats. In the laboratory, in a studio—everything is artificial, but not repulsive. Disturbing, perhaps. But also funny, as the film shows here (WARNING: graphic content):

A boy of about 14 feels uncomfortable watching this and urges his father to leave. Very little is filmed or photographed at all. It’s actually kind of cool, Beatrice thinks to herself, and goes into the room opposite, where she comes across a row of containers used for transporting sperm. In response to the drastic decline in sperm count and viability, a group of American teenagers has invented a new sport: Sperm Racing.
“Crazy,” Beatrice thinks, “but somehow a clean contribution from the Danes. And ‘clean’ is a word that fits well.” Clean and dystopian. That would also be her only criticism. Somehow too clean, too perfect. Too dystopian. That makes it almost nostalgic. There was that era of the speculative, the post-internet artists, the accelerationists. Everything was particularly artificial, fictitious, slicker than advertising. But monstrous. The end of critical distance. LOL. Capitalist futurism or something like that. The New York artist collective DIS were the main proponents and they also collaborated with Maja Malou Lyse on the film here. Ten years ago, in 2016, DIS curated the pretty good 9th Berlin Biennale: The Present in Drag. Good biennials only get better with time.

Beatrice is flying over to Japan. Ohhhhhh… Wait! The Russians! She didn’t really want to see it, even though it’s back in competition. But now that it’s closed? Why is that? You can see Christmas trees in plastic pots through the windows (in their title is a tree, after all, Rooted in the Sky). And you can see a Mongolian video in which a horse is being interviewed. That would have interested Beatrice after all. A horse that talks. About homeland. Okay, Japan:

After the Danish’ sperm race, you can now carry babies—or baby dolls—through the Japanese Pavilion. You pick them up at the lower end, carry the baby doll through the garden, change the diapers and perform a QR code ritual in which each baby is given a poem. Beatrice is afraid of the dolls wearing sunglasses. Then Pete calls and pushes a little. He says she can skip Korea, Germany, Canada, England, and France for now—they’re not in his top 5. “Okay, I get it.” They agree to meet at the Austrian Pavilion, Pete’s favorite.
And now a brief look at ornithology: It’s generally accepted that birds are descended from the diapsid lineage of amniotes (see also reptiles). Their closest relatives: crocodiles. Haha! Subgroup: Archosauria. Males of some bird groups, such as ratites and anatidae, have well-developed copulatory organs, while others have none at all or a simple bird penis. Female birds generally have only one—specifically the left—ovary, while males have two gonads. Flying is easier with a lower body weight. The sexual organs shrink significantly outside the breeding season, but not immediately after egg-laying, possibly to allow for a second clutch to follow. During mating, known as the mounting act, the male climbs onto the female’s back, and both press their cloacas (the single opening for everything) together. This lasts only a few seconds but is often repeated.

Pete’s 12 points go to Austria!!! SEAWORLD VENICE by Florentina Holzinger is definitely the crowd favorite. If the audience had been allowed to vote—and not Beatrice and Pete—Austria would have won. (WARNING 2: graphic content)

The line in front of it is the longest. Every full hour, a female*performer hangs upside down in the bell. Like a clapper. And as the hour strikes, people all over the Giardini drop their sandwiches, their water bottles, their kids, their bad moods, but not their phones, which they hold up like a crucifix. To lend this moment something sacred. Female*performer in a bell. Holy smoke.

“Powerful symbols,” thinks Beatrice, observing how the female*performers are lying and writhing in the water. In water that visitors can contribute, in two portable toilets. (No shitting! Otherwise the alarm goes off.) Then the urine is filtered and turned into pure drinking water. And fed back into the cycle.
“But we seagulls have that special gland above our eyes that lets us remove excess salt from our bodies. That means we can drink seawater!” Beatrice says to Pete. She’s annoyed because Pete’s raving about everything here. The robot dog, the jet ski,—even though Pete despises jet skis, especially when drunk Austrians are tearing across the Adriatic on them—the sleeping Venus! And the staged fight in the filtration plant, where the performers splash each other with urine, and, and, and… That’s a lot. But it’s supposed to be a lot.

Viennese Actionism by cool female*performers. Beatrice briefly thinks of the great Valie Export, who just died. Another great artist, Paul McCarthy, once said that what the Viennese Actionists did with blood, he did with ketchup. There’s no more beautiful way to liberate oneself. Florentina Holzinger also plays with the legacy. With transgression. She sees her great work as a critique. Of mass tourism, of trash, of modernity, “of the act itself.” In their text, they write of a Frankensteinesque dystopia. But we gulls, for example, eat what you call trash. And we see Frankensteining as an opportunity for new composition, for errors, for bugs—when the act, modernity, and trash offer possibilities. We don’t even need to call it that. Or produce trash at all. Human urine and shit were already being used unfiltered in cycles for fertilizing as early as 1900. It would have been easy to celebrate the filtration system, to celebrate Venice’s incredibly unique and functional water system, and not to just invoke its downfall. Still, Beatrice is impressed. Pete, of course. If only because here are real female*performers around and under water. They’ll keep doing this until the end of the Biennale. Austrian style. Great! Will anyone else overtake Austria? Denmark is safely in second or third place. Israel is at the Arsenale—in case anyone is thinking of those seven minutes in Vienna when Israel led the Eurovision Song Contest. Waving Israeli flags. Silence. Until Bangaranga from Bulgaria saved the world. Saved Europe. And the ESC. The worst act at the ESC by the way was the Italian one. Sal Da Vinci’s Per Sempre Si. A disco anthem about the joys of marriage. About as bad and relevant as the Italian soccer team. Si is an unpopular word here anyway. Ever since the referendum.

But then it all happened very quickly. Not Brazil, nor Greece. But—on this we all agreed—Poland! Truly beautiful. And moving. Liquid Tongues by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski. Alternative modes of communication inspired by non-human life. And by Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale from 1970 (Timmy?) Which back then led to the ban on whaling and saved whales from extinction. Really! The Choir in Motion (Chór w Ruchu), hearing and deaf people interpret the communication codes of whales. In spoken English and International Sign Language (IS). Very good.

It may be ‘just’ film, but it still feels close. And pleasantly effortless. With their red rubber boots in the snow. Red swimsuits and red fingernails. Little Red Riding Hood capes. It has a peculiar lightness and beauty, also thanks to the simple installation. Some viewers fall asleep, either on the platform where you can lie down underneath a screen or on the stools in front of the large projection. A great film critic once said that falling asleep in the cinema means trusting the film.

We’ve had quite a bit going on here, too. During the opening days of the Biennale, we put together a little event with our friends from Lalaguna, a fantastic new cosmetics brand based here in Venice. They have a showroom on the Lido at Via Sandro Gallo 47a, where we also have a display window—and a flagpole.

Lukas Kubina presented texts by himself and Sorry Press, and Lalaguna invited the Venetian artist Cecilia Amati. She exhibited four beautiful paintings of doges: Ludovico Manin, Pietro Mocenigo, Antonio Grimani, and Andrea Vendramin. Doges were the rulers of Venice for 1,100 years, when the city was given the name La Serenissima. The most Serene. There were good and bad doges, evil and cunning ones, and a final doge. Who is also included in Cecilia’s selection. We want to do this once a month now. By the way, tomorrow, Sunday the 24th, is the Finissage, if you’re here. Between 5:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.
AND we’re now doing Unlikely Talks! The first ones are done, featuring Federico Sargentone, who published the great book Midcareer Writing with Sorry Press, and Matteo Stocco, an artist and filmmaker from Venice, whom we can confirm knows at least 85% of the Venetians. Walking with him from the Giardini to the Arsenale takes about two hours. Both have insightful und funny thoughts on the city and the future, and Matteo also has a few restaurant recommendations.
And by the way, check out (again) Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull—it’s set in Russia around 1900 and there’s a play within the play that’s set in the future. In 200,000 years!! All living creatures are extinct. But really, it’s about love, jealousy, sex, and truth. And the gull is a symbol of the artist’s free spirit. And it gets sacrificed. Haha! Bangaranga ragazzi, see you soon! With #37. Per Sempre Si. No, no, no!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 34:

Bye bye, Venezi

First, some good news: Venezia FC will be back in Serie A next season. They secured promotion last week in La Spezia. And now there’s just one game left—on Friday here at the stadium against Palermo. It was pretty much a sure thing this time. They’ve been in first spot for weeks and are playing really well.

The second piece of good news is that we saw Mimmo, the cheerful dolphin from the lagoon. With our own eyes. He was swimming alongside the ferry from the Lido to Tronchetto, just after we’d been wondering where he was. Whether he’d survived it. But he’d simply vanished from the news. And had been pushed aside by Timmy, the humpback whale in the Baltic Sea and symbol of our world that has run itself aground on every possible sandbar. But he, too, has now disappeared. Gone! After they had named him ‘Hope.’ That was perhaps the decisive mistake. And now everyone is blaming each other.

Mimmo, on the other hand, is a solitary dolphin who gets along just fine without a party, a herd, a pod, or a family. And so far, he seems to be quite clever at staying away from ship propellers. In D major. Don’t name him Hope or Freedom or Happy please.

The next piece of good news is that conductor Beatrice Venezi has been fired from the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice. She is a friend of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s and was pushed through by the right wing, against the wishes of the orchestra and the audience. La Fenice! Where Maria Callas, la Divina, made her debut in ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in 1947. It’s a bitter defeat for the right. After seven months of struggle that shook the city. And here, mayoral elections are coming up end of May. Luigi Brugnaro is not running again! This is old news, but still very good news. The Venezi affair has certainly helped the center-left candidate Andrea Martella. The Democratic Party senator is supported by the Greens, the Five Star Movement, the Radicals, the Socialists, and several civil society groups. After 11 (the sacred number of Carnival) gloomy years under Brugnaro, who has been implicated in all manner of corruption scandals. No one can stand him anymore. But the fact that the musicians, the workers, and the audience prevailed against Venezi, against the mayor, the artistic director Colabianchi, and the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli has unleashed a wave of energy. Now they want the others to go, too. Colabianchi will have to resign as well. Minister of Culture Guili is also in a difficult position. He had already announced that he would not attend the opening of this year’s Biennale. In Minor Keys. Then the official opening ceremony was canceled anyway.

Instead Guili sent four inspectors from the Roman Collegio, the state cultural oversight agency, to the Biennale’s headquarters at Ca’ Giustinian. Almost at the same time, Glenn Micallef canceled his visit for this year. He said he would not set foot in the Giardini “as long as Russia is invited.” He is the EU Commissioner for Culture. The EU had already frozen a 2 million euro grant for the Biennale. Precisely because of Russia. But the interesting thing is that the inspectors hadn’t come because of the Kremlin Pavilion at all. Which is what everyone initially thought. Because the Minister of Culture Giuli was opposed to the decision by Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco to allow Russia to exhibit. No, they were here because the Israeli-Romanian artist Belu-Simion Fainaru had sent a warning letter to the Biennale Foundation, in which he invoked the European Court of Human Rights and threatened legal action. “I am a victim of racial discrimination” and, of course, “anti-Semitism.” Because they didn’t want to consider him for the prizes. Along with the Russian artists. The jury had decided that. The two countries whose heads of state are charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity were to be excluded from the prizes. Actually quite smart, after hundreds of Biennale participants had signed a petition against Israel’s participation. And the Israeli government announced it would do in Lebanon what it did in Gaza. Israel’s pavilion is being renovated anyway; the transition is in the Arsenale. It’s just the prizes, after all. It’s just the Biennale. But the outcry was, as always, huge. In minor keys. The artist Belu-Simion Fainaru exhibited at the Romanian Pavilion back in 2019, along with two others. His work was a tree that spoke—an interactive tree. And then, if anyone remembers, you walked into the next room and there was a black liquid on the floor. Unfinished Conversations on the Weight of Absence, it was called.
Back to last week: On April 30, nine days before the opening all five jury members resigned: chairwoman Solange Farkas, Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi. The jury had been appointed by the curator of the Biennale Koyo Kouoh, who subsequently passed away. Her team was supposed to take over after her death, but instead, the rather clumsy yet equally vain president Buttafuoco stepped into the void. The real problem with the world is that we no longer have any Latin scholars, Buttafuoco said in his first interview after the announcement that the Russians were coming: “…we were looking for a good Latin scholar and we still haven’t found one. It occurred to me that until the 1980s, you could find plenty of Latin scholars in Parliament. This speaks volumes about the vitality of the social fabric…” The problem, however, is rather that Buttafuoco always claims art is free and would heal wounds and transcend borders and foster freedom and peace, but just at the moment when he could have saved this Biennale, by preventing the official Kremlin artists from coming, his vanity stood in his way. Or his love for Russia, his Eurasian dream. He could have made up some excuse. By simply pointing out a security risk. A bureaucratic problem.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is in Matteo Salvini’s Lega party. The same goes for Alberto Stefani, who has been president of the Veneto Region since last December and is one of three members of the Biennale’s supervisory board. The Biennale’s vice president is Mayor Brugnaro. Another member is the former television journalist Tamara Gregoretti. She is supposed to represent the Ministry of Culture. But Minister Giuli wanted to get rid of her after she did not inform him that Buttafuoco was inviting the Russians. The minister failed and Gregoretti is still on the board.

When the jury stepped down last week, the Biennale board postponed the award ceremony until the end of the exhibition, November 22. It will not be an expert jury that selects the best participant or the best pavilion, but the public. Matteo Salvini celebrated the decision. He called it “truly democratic.” Besides art, democracy is Salvini’s field of expertise. But that’s not all: Israel and Russia were once again admitted to the competition. Hahahahahaahaaha.
The newspaper La Repubblica quoted the Biennale’s lawyer, Debora Rossi, from the Roman Collegio inspectors’ report: “that the jury had been informed not only of the media reactions against the Biennale, but also of their personal risk of being held liable for damages not only to the plaintiff”—the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru—“but also to the foundation.” This is what the Biennale’s lawyer told the inspectors!! A jury that is held liable to the Biennale?
Giorgia Meloni was kept informed of every move. Almost in real time. And she stayed completely out of it. Sure, Meloni is in a tough spot herself. She lost the referendum. She can’t be seen with Elon Musk anymore. Donald Trump and JD Vance got a few slaps on the wrist from the cool Pope Leo. Trump started the war in Iran, which isn’t very popular here either. None of this is good for her. Gas has gotten super expensive. Even the old tricks don’t work anymore. Blame the EU. Now Orbán is gone, too. Meloni then suddenly allied herself with Ukraine. Private photos with Zelenskyy. She’s afloat.

Then, in her speech to the Chamber of Deputies, she tells the opposition: “I challenge you to a substantive debate. Italians have the right to know what proposals are on the table. On the merits of the international crisis, on the merits of the risks to energy supply, on the merits of a Europe that cannot regain real relevance… Let’s talk about solutions; let’s see who has them.” Is this how someone in charge of the government speaks? Someone who has a program or an idea? Opposition leader Elly Schlein responded quite cleverly: “You challenge us, but you have already lost that challenge because you defied the Constitution, and the sovereign people defeated you at the polls. (…) It’s clear you’re eager to return to the opposition; don’t worry, we’ll grant you your wish.” Pretty good, isn’t it?
The recently deceased philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote: “Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.” If this belief is not upheld, if ruling politicians turn against democratic institutions in a hostile manner, if they use their position in government to oppose the state—as almost all far-right figures do—it is hard to imagine a better future. But as the philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger writes in his beautiful new book, The Presence of Philosophy: A Roadmap, which has just been published in German: “If something is a labyrinth, it will also have an exit.” Mimmo knows that. But he feels quite comfortable in the labyrinth. Ciao ragazzi, see you soon! With #36. And don’t call it Hope!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 34:

The Lock-In-Effect

Just half an hour ago, the humpback whale in the Baltic Sea ran aground on a sandbank for the third time. The fool. And so he is increasingly becoming a metaphor for the world. For politics, for democracy, for Europe, for the West. For the Left, for Italian football, for Italy itself, for Germany, for France, for opera, for cinema, for the Biennale, … Or simply a mirror. Everyone can identify with Timmy. Come on! Go on, swim! Get a move on, get going! Pull yourself together. Fat pig. Get up! Just like in the army. Or at the gym. Or on TikTok. 15 minutes a day is enough for a six-pack! No, can’t be bothered. Not enough salt. It’s lovely here. On the sandbank. And now a seagull’s perched on my back. So what?
The whale is different from the cheerful dolphin in the lagoon. Remember? Where is it, actually? What was its name again? Mimmy, Mummo, Mambo? But the whale is far more interesting. It’s still breathing! Most of the time. Two hours ago it was nowhere to be seen. For a bit. Hopefully he is going to make it! To the North Sea. How? Where is that anyway? He didn’t look well. Why? What does a whale that looks well look like? In any case, he’s magnificently melancholic. The Marcello Mastroianni of the seas. Mumbo wasn’t like that. He was just a dolphin. And Mumbo wanted to. Timmy doesn’t. That makes him more contemporary. Humpback whales aren’t even endangered. Eels are endangered, sturgeons are endangered. But humpback whales, not really. Probably because nobody eats whale. Except the Japanese. Sorry, of course.

What on earth has become of the Biennale? That old whale. Haven’t heard a peep from it in ages. Run aground? Older readers may recall that the Moby Dick of the art world invited the Russian Pavilion. Or rather, allowed them to come. President Buttafuoco has manoeuvred himself onto a huge sandbank giving La Repubblica a completely ludicrous interview. We reported on that. In which he plays the peacemaker and spouts some very cynical nonsense. That we no longer have enough Latin scholars. That would be the downfall of the West, or the world. Just as his kindred spirit Alexander Dugin says that the Russian kids’ blockbuster Cheburashka would be “the epitome of the kind of nonsense I have spent my whole life fighting against.” The crocodile, in particular. Buttafuoco & Dugin hate the West. They hate modernity. They hate America (even before Trump… even before Richard Nixon. Even before Christopher Columbus!) They believe in Eurasia. It’s all hard to understand; in fact, the traditionalists themselves don’t really understand it. They are, in any case, vain, conceited hyper-intellectuals. Not whales. More like eels. Or sturgeons. But not victims either. Perhaps some invasive sunfish. In any case, the President said everyone was welcome. Quite a few people disagreed. Including Russian dissidents. People in prison. Pussy Riot. The oppressed. The Ukraine. That makes dialogue very, very difficult. But Matteo Salvini has come to Buttafuoco’s aid. They’re in the same party. Salvini said sport and art are free. Really? Hahaha. The very old among us will still remember that Salvini was a fervent supporter of Vladimir Putin. He’d briefly forgotten this himself…

In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes wrote that rulers (the sovereign) are obliged to prevent wars. Because people, by nature, would start wars. And if the ruler prevents wars, he has absolute power over the people. If not, he can go to hell. He derives his power not from God, but from his actions. The book was also seen as a justification for parliament. Leviathan is a chaotic sea creature from the Hebrew Bible and earlier mythologies, which had to be tamed by a social contract.
The Happiness Report 2026 has just been published. And once again, the Scandinavians come out on top. Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland. Although one might think that it’s dark there for half the year and they get senselessly drunk like in Aki Kaurismäki films. Serotonin deficiency, bad skin, bad moods… No! Time and again they come out on top. Of course: little corruption, fairly high levels of security, fairly wealthy. Ice bathing. But, most importantly: they believe in the state. They trust in elections. They believe that somehow they’ll manage it. And that they’ll be helped. That they won’t end up living on the streets in the end. That’s how democracy works. Democracy is simply not a community of values. Because values are subjective. Like morals and ethics. Instead people vote and assume they’ll be able to vote again in four years’ time. Possibly for the same candidate. In Turkey, for example, that’s not possible because the opposition candidate is in prison. One can learn a great deal about this from the very Federal Republic-esque, that is, West German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Like Alexander Kluge, he seemed to be a rather cheerful person. Unlike their teachers at the Frankfurt School. Habermas, however, was also difficult to quote, yet a towering champion of parliamentary democracy.

Mr Habermas and Mr Kluge have both passed away in quick succession. This is a great loss.
The lock-in effect is a term from the housing market. Tenants or homeowners whose children have moved out cannot move to a smaller flat because these have become much more expensive in the meantime. Nor can they afford the larger one anymore. At the same time, families having children cannot find a larger flat. It’s far too expensive, too. Whether to buy or rent. So people stay put until they’re broke. Until they have to leave. Until they starve. Not enough salt.
So much for the market. Few people rent here. And the situation is even worse because there are far too many holiday flats in Venice. People from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or simply wealthy Italians with part-time spaces. Empty in winter, sometimes rented out during the Mostra and the Biennale opening.
Lock-out effect: Young Venetians can only buy or rent in Mestre. If at all. Or leave. Drain. Brain drain. The old folks mostly vote for the far right. So that nothing changes. Sandbank. Very little salt.

Oh yes, and then there was the referendum. One of the flagship initiatives of Giorgia Meloni’s government. They wanted fewer ‘left-wing’ judges. Politicians should have much more say in who is allowed to become a judge or prosecutor. Their own people, in other words. Just like in the cultural sector. (Not only in Italy, but also in Germany, with Wolfram Weimer, and with Rachida Dati in France, there are now cultural politicians with little sympathy for culture but facing allegations of corruption) But since nobody understood what the referendum was actually about, it boiled down to right versus left. Yes! versus No! Because they didn’t understand it themselves. Because they believe they can do everything better. “My sister!” Oh, I see. Of course the judiciary needs to be much faster and less bureaucratic. Take the example of Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice. He has been under investigation since 2022 for “systematically pursuing personal interests”, and in May last year the Venice Public Prosecutor’s Office asked the investigating judge to bring him and the other 33 suspects to trial. And then?

Si! (i.e. Meloni) has lost. No! has won; the constitution won’t be changed. And as I write this, Italy is losing the match against Bosnia and Herzegovina on penalties. First a red card, then the levelling goal, then the penalty shoot-out in which goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma crumpled up his Bosnian counterpart’s cheat sheet. Just imagine if they’d won? Because of the crumpled piece of paper? And afterwards, Donnarumma got angry. Because the Squadra Azzurra didn’t win. No! That means Italy won’t be at the World Cup for the third time in a row. Maybe in 2030. Children here will turn 16 without ever having seen a World Cup in which their team played. What does that do to the country?

The 2026 curator, Koyo Kouoh, wanted a quiet Biennale, one of nuances. Not the constant, loud ‘Yes! No! Good! Evil!’ dichotomies. Just shades of grey, subtle tones. Complex, difficult situations. Situations, not constellations. Like music. A brilliant concept these days, with the lovely title In Minor Keys. That must have appealed to the supposedly so profound President Buttafuoco. Engage with music! With silence. With the intermediate tones. Then curator Koyo Kouoh died. She can no longer comment on any of this. Where, actually, is her team that is continuing the project? Buttafuoco has taken over, explaining what art may and must do, and what it cannot and will not do. Salvini does the same. The Minister for Culture, Alessandro Giuli, has opposed Buttafuoco. Different party. That doesn’t make the Minister for Culture any better.

The Squadra Azzurra needs a complete makeover. The Meloni government will drag itself to the next election, stop holding referendums, run aground on several sandbanks and then try to win with plenty of lies and selfies. And what about Timmy, the humpback whale in the Baltic Sea? Attempts to rescue him have been abandoned. He will probably die a slow death. And the Biennale? This year will be Alberto Barbera’s last film festival. Perhaps the Biennale should also completely reinvent itself. More salt. No party members. Away from the market. Away… Ciao ragazzi, see you soon! With #35. And don’t forget: Mumbo, Mumbo!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 33:

When the House Burns Down

It’s dogged. First there’s a break, then two issues, then nothing again. When you write every week, you’re in the flow. You’re constantly thinking about it, discarding ideas, rethinking them. When the regularity is gone, other things take over. Besides, the world is becoming increasingly bewildering. And darker. It’s pretty tough to just whip up a funny piece of writing on the fly. And Science Fiction? Forget it. When the future is already here? When AI agents have their own social media and make fun of humans? Something’s gone wrong with the future.

BUT sometimes you get a free kick. Out of nowhere. Like last week, when Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale president we already featured in ISSUE 30, gave a completely ridiculous interview to La Repubblica. The day before, Russia had announced that it would be exhibiting in the Giardini again this year. With Alexander Dugin as curator. No, that’s not quite right. But almost.

We can look forward to pro-government Russian folklorists Toloka and many more outspoken supporters of the so-called military special operation—that is, the WAR against Ukraine. And DJ Diaki from Mali is coming. (This is the country that the Wagner Group pretty much destroyed.) “A music festival brought to life,” serving as a “space for dialogue and exchange.” How wonderful!

In 2022, Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva canceled their pavilion participation in protest against the INVASION of Ukraine. Back then the Biennale released a statement, welcoming the decision and condemning “all those who use violence to prevent dialogue and peace.”
Now, in the Buttafuoco era and the fifth year of the WAR that no longer applies. It’s actually like his first art biennale; “La mia Biennale sarà la vera tregua” is the title of his talk in La Repubblica, “My Biennale will be the real respite.” His biennale. The curator, Koyo Kouoh, as we mentioned in the last stack, tragically died. It seems as if Mr Buttafuoco has now also taken over her job. And he loves it. When asked whether the Minister of Culture in Rome, Alessandro Giuli, knew about the Russians coming, he replied: “Yes, and we are in constant dialogue with the minister. I allow myself to bring him sunny souvenirs, for example from Mongolia. And we are, after all, two readers of René Guénon. We are very clear about The Kingdom of Quantity and The Signs of the Times.” So, two aesthetes exchanging views on the über-traditionalist Guénon. It’s likely that the two fascist mystics frequently see each other on Zoom calls with Alexander Dugin. What on earth are ‘sunny souvenirs from Mongolia’? Dodgy code?
René Guénon (later Abdel Wahid Yahia) is also a huge influence on Steve Bannon. Especially his apocalyptic view of history. For Guénon, the destruction of the Knights Templar and the Peace of Westphalia marked the beginning of the West’s spiritual decline. Got it? More on Buttafuoco and the traditionalists here in ISSUE 30.

But then some MEPs and art world figures organized the usual petition drive, and two days later, the Italian Minister of Culture claimed to have always been against inviting Russia. Mr Buttafuoco stuck to his guns. Maximum attention, maximum disruption! Despite writing about the In Minor Keys Biennale: “As the world turns up the volume and voices distort in the din – to the point of all meaning being obscured – there remains only one way to communicate: by creating a listening zone tuned in to a lower frequency. More intimate, welcoming, human, but no less charismatic.” Mr Buttafuoco is a member of the fascist Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini’s party. And they are known for being exactly that: “…More intimate, welcoming, human…”
In 2018, (yes, before that WAR) the Biennale president declared that Putin was “the only true right-wing statesman” in the world. He calls all that now in La Repubblica “diplomacy of beauty,” which would reflect Venice’s unique history.

Another day later, this must have been last Friday, the philosopher and former mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari (ISSUE 29), apparently came to President Buttafuoco’s defense. Also in La Repubblica. Art is free, he said. But then comes the kicker: a political assessment would only be possible after the artworks had been shown. If there was any war propaganda among them, then it could be criticized and action taken. With this lineup, things aren’t looking good for the president. Take Anastasia Karneeva, for example, the commissioner of the Russian pavilion. Ms Karneeva is the daughter of Nikolai Volobuev, a retired general and deputy director of the giant arms manufacturer Rostec. Between 1975 and 2004, he worked for the KGB and FSB. Karneeva herself founded the art consultancy Smart Art in 2014 together with Ekaterina Vinokurova, the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Ms Karneeva now also has a company that belongs to the Rostec empire.

President Buttafuoco maneuvered himself into a mess. Perhaps he will soon become the FIFA boss. Anastasia Karneeva has been approached for comment (not by us, obviously). To turn up the volume: Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot has announced that they will perform in Venice in protest against Russia’s return. Very, very, very good.

The title of the 2026 Russian contribution is: The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky, and comes from Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce) by the French anti-fascist mystic Simone Weil: “It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.” For the philosopher, activist, and radical moral thinker, Gravity were the natural forces that pull the soul downward. Like Necessity, Ego, and Power. While Grace, in her paradoxical metaphor, was the divine light that comes from beyond the world.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called Ms. Weil ‘the clearest conscience of our time.’ And he completed his law degree with a thesis on her.
Giorgio Agamben was a professor of aesthetics here at the Facoltà di Design e Arti della IUAV for many years and has written quite a bit about Venice. For example, in the late 2000s, the beautiful essay: On The Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Specters. Manfredo Tafuri’s description of Venice as a kind of historical ‘corpse’ is his starting point and he argues that European cities and traditions live on as ‘specters’. As traces or signs left behind in history.

When the House Burns Down is the beautiful title of a book by Mr Agamben, published in Italian in 2020, Quando la casa brucia, by Giometti & Antonello, Macerata. In English in 2022 by Seagull Books, and in German in 2025 by Merve as Wenn das Haus brennt. It’s a philosophical and poetic reflection on some of the crises of our time. Including the Covid era. Of course. 2020… But wait! We know, Mr Agamben was anti-vaxxer, anti-state (always ever was) and anti-masks. Sure this is in the text, and (not but) it’s a very beautiful, very profound, and enchanting book. No mumbling justifications. As always a little enigmatic, and he invites us to sit with him on a mountain top and look down on a world that is destroying itself in a frenzy of madness. The crisis of experience. Lives exposed by a lack of experience. Doors and Thresholds. Language, of course, language! Contemporaneity. Being a witness. And testimony. The book reads like a summary of Giorgio Agamben’s work. This is the beginning:
“’Tutto quello che faccio non ha senso, se la casa brucia’. Eppure proprio mentre la casa brucia occorre continuare come sempre, fare tutto con cura e precisione, forse ancora più studiosamente - anche se nessuno dovesse accorgersene.”

“’There is no sense in anything I do, if the house burns down.’ And yet it is exactly while the house is burning that one must carry on as always, must do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more diligently—even if no one notices.”
When the House Burns Down is also about war. The fire is war. Not the WAR, but war. Agamben asks in the book when the fire started: “Da guanto tempo la casa brucia? Da quanto tempo è bruciata? Certamente un secolo fa, fra il 1914 e il 1918, qualcosa è avvenuto in Europa che ha gettato nelle fiamme e nella follia tutto quello che sembrava restare di integro e vivo;…” “…between 1914 and 1918, something happened in Europe that threw everything that still seemed whole and alive into the flames and into madness; then, once again, thirty years later, the blaze broke out everywhere and since then has not ceased to burn, without pause, quietly, barely visible below the ashes.”

The great second chapter, Door and Threshold, deals with Carlo Scarpa’s design for the entrance to the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), which was commissioned in the 1960s. This is the place where Mr Agamben later taught. Mr Scarpa was to use an Istrian stone door that had been rediscovered during the restoration of the Convento dei Tolentini and he decided to lay this Istrian door flat on the ground. And fill it with water.

…it can never be closed. (Moreover, Venice—of which Scarpa’s door is, perhaps, something like an invocation—has no need of city gates: to enter it one has to cross a threshold which is the water of the lagoon, just as to get to the submersed door one has to set foot in the water)”

…which only in the case of foris seems to acquire the meaning of a separation between what is inside (included) and what is outside (excluded). The decisive point, however, is that the idea of an ‘outside [fuori]’ is expressed with a term that literally means ‘at the door’ (foris, foras). The ‘outside’ is not another space cleanly separated from the inside by a border:…

Mr Buttafuoco says that Venice has always been a place where people meet. Right. The Biennale therefore has a kind of ‘foreign policy role.’ Right!
And we really hope it will be “..More intimate, welcoming, human...”

The third chapter of Giorgio Agamben’s book is about the contemporary. In his view it doesn’t just mean being present in one’s time. Or keeping up to date. You can be present and still have no clue of the present. Being contemporary means being alert and being a witness. Sounds very Simone Weil: Attention. And grace. Making Space. She went to Spain in 1936, to fight the fascists in the Civil War. Political transformation not through power but a change in how we perceive reality.
In 1940, Simone Weil began writing Venise sauvée (Venice Saved) a tragedy in three acts: The city is threatened by a plot of Spanish mercenaries to overthrow the Republic of Venice in 1618. But saved by one of the conspirators, Jaffier, who, seized by its beauty, cannot bring himself to take it by force.
Like many of Ms Weil’s writings, it is rarely read because her early death in 1943, interrupted its completion.

In 1963, while studying law and perhaps writing his thesis on Simone Weil, Giorgio Agamben played the apostle Philippus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
Ciao ragazzi, see you soon, hopefully next week. With #34.
And remember: Even when the house is on fire, you have to carry on as usual.

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 32:

Out Of Place

It would have been good if the Olympic Games had ended on Saturday evening. Italy led the medal table together with Japan. JD Vance sang ‘Volare’ in Italian during the opening ceremony and was booed. Haiti won gold for the most beautiful outfit, and British freestyler Gus Kenworthy for artistic snow peeing.

AND! Long track speedskater Gina Lollobrigida won gold in the 3,000-meter race. Sorry, not Gina, it’s Francesca Lollobrigida. Francesca is Gina’s grandniece. In Italy, she is now celebrated as the ‘gold mama.’ And the day she broke the Olympic record was her 35th birthday.

But then! On Sunday morning, Lindsay Vonn, wearing race number 13, got her arm caught on a pole shortly after the start (exactly 13 seconds after) and took a nasty fall. She was taken by helicopter to the hospital in Treviso. It should be noted that Vonn had started without a cruciate ligament in her knee. A great story. A 41-year-old who, after a serious knee injury (the other knee), resulting in severe pain and a forced end to her career, comes back with a prosthesis. At first, people felt sorry for her. Old woman can’t stop! The three-time Olympic medallist said that skiing was her sun. Yeah, right. Sure. But then! This winter, she dominated the downhill races. She became the frontrunner… and injured herself again. Shortly before the Olympics. Then she announced that she would compete anyway. Orthopedists were heard, seen, and read on all channels, discussing whether this was even possible.

Comebacks seem to be a classic American story. Hero’s Journey. Campfires. Symbolic death & rebirth. Rio Bravo. Revelation. Lindsay Vonn’s ex-boyfriend Tiger Woods was at rock bottom... in every sense of the word. And then he came back. In a big way. Fallen heroines and heroes fight their way back. People love that. Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold at Sunday’s Super Bowl. Novak Djokovic. Fantastic. Suddenly he is likeable. Because he can lose. He seems older. At the same time, his right-wing nationalist father disappears. Djokovic loses even more and criticises the regime in his home country. Rebirth. He moves to Athens. And loses again. The audience now celebrates him. Then he beats Jannik Sinner in Australia. At the age of 38. Revelation.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump has also made an unusual comeback.

There’s nothing likeable about that. Even some athletes and fans are ashamed of their country. American figure skater Amber Glenn, who identifies as a bisexual/pansexual woman, said: “I know that a lot of people say, ‘You’re just an athlete,’ like, ‘Stick to your job,’ ‘Shut up about politics,’. But politics affect us all. It is something that I will not just be quiet about, because it is something that affects us in our everyday lives.” So true.

Hunter Hess, a halfpipe specialist from Oregon, told reporters that he had ‘mixed feelings’ about representing the United States. “Just because I carry the flag doesn’t mean I stand for everything that happens in the US.”
Donald Trump subsequently described Mr. Hess as a ‘real loser’.
Glenn and Hess were stunned by the then hellish backlash. The American Olympic Committee felt compelled to issue a statement reaffirming that it stood behind all its athletes and would ensure their safety. Amber Glenn: “People online attacking people for speaking their minds, which is their (First Amendment) right, is absolutely absurd.”

On Monday, freestyle skier Eileen Gu and snowboarder Chloe Kim responded to Trump’s ‘loser’ post about Hunter Hess. Kim said she was proud to represent the US, but that athletes had the right to express their beliefs. “We need to lead with love and compassion, and I’d love to see more of that.” She is 25 and is aiming for her third consecutive gold medal in the halfpipe. Her parents came to California from South Korea in 1982. “Obviously, my parents being immigrants, this one hits pretty close to home.” After the 2022 Games in Beijing, Kim suffered from severe depression and took a long break. It was unclear whether she would ever return. She spoke about the harassment she had faced on social media and how she “began to hate winning.” But Chloe Kim came back. Then, a few weeks ago, she took a bad fall and dislocated her shoulder. She will be wearing a brace. All eyes on her. Wednesday and Thursday.
Eileen Gu won on Monday silver in freeski slopestyle. Her fourth Olympic medal. “One of the very few common languages, that of the human body, that of the human spirit, the competitive spirit, the capacity to break not only records,
but especially in our sport, literally the human limit. How wonderful
is that?” she said. She is 22. And has already won two gold medals. Gu was born and raised in San Francisco and trained with U.S. Ski & Snowboard. But in 2019, she switched to her mother’s native country, China. Now she competes for China. A decision that has been heavily debated. China does not allow dual citizenship, and there is no sign that she has given up her American one. Gu understands what Hess and Amber Glenn are going through right now. “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so …” she said “unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”
Yes. The Games pretend to be a show of global harmony in a world that is anything but. Out Of Place. Based on old rules (of [international] cooperation) which no longer apply. BUT what feels right and where? Dove? ¿Dónde? WHERE?

For example, there is a new art fair in Doha called ‘Art Basel Qatar.’ David Beckham was there for the opening; he is the emirate’s poster boy. And Jenny Holzer was there too. In 1990, she came up with a pretty impressive American pavilion here in Venice and rightly won the Golden Lion. She became famous for her Truisms, texts that are more or less socio-critical. Were. Now 75, she has projected verses by Mahmoud Darwish and Nujoom Alghanem onto the I.M. Pei Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. ‘SONG’. Site-responsive. Although it looked exactly the same at the Guggenheim. What was new were the almost 1,000 drones that wrote words and phrases in the night sky over and over again. Meant to be an aesthetic coup and somehow morally unsettling, it was kind of kitsch. In 2022, during the Qatar Soccer World Cup, everyone was upset about the lack of freedom of expression, women’s rights, men’s polygamy and the ban on homosexuality.
Jenny Holzer says that it’s now difficult to find a place which is ethically uncontroversial. That’s partly true. In many countries, the situation wouldn’t look good, “including my own.” Also true. However, verses by the late Palestinian poet Darwish are a fine gesture of solidarity with the Palestinians. But given Qatar’s close relationship with Hamas – to this day, it is not clear how much the Al Thani ruling family knew before 7 October – it’s not particularly courageous or political. And they can’t have much against Alghanem and her poems and meditative films either. In 2019, she became the first woman to design the United Arab Emirates Pavillon in Venice.
The artistic director of the fair is Egyptian artist Wael Shawky. He picked the theme ‘Becoming’. Okay. Each of the 87 galleries was asked to select only one artist. The press releases say that the show offers artists from the region the opportunity to regain control over ‘their own narratives’. How do you do that nowadays? Or to put it another way: doesn’t that happen all the time? Everywhere? Things might not necessarily be much better where we live. Because right-wing parties are either in power or dominate the discourse from the opposition. But is it really arrogance or even ‘gentle colonisation’ to talk about the situation in other parts of the world? Doesn’t this argument tie the conditions of human life to geographical peculiarities and reduce them to that? ‘We’re different here.’ Where?

Art Basel moves on to its next stop: Hong Kong. There, Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday. He had founded the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan ‘An apple a day keeps the liars away’.
Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, is enforcing a far-reaching crackdown on any signs of dissent. Geographical peculiarities. To this end, a few huge museums are currently being built on the mainland in Shenzhen. About half an hour from Hong Kong. A new kind of art is to be exhibited there. A new market is to be created. Art with their own narratives. Fast and easy to comprehend. Not critical. Not political. This allows the reverse conclusion and makes the Art Basel art relevant again.
Qatar has also purchased its own pavilion in the Biennale Giardini. We have already reported on this. Right at the entrance. Next to North Korea.

Now that would be a comeback story: The Left. If the dead horse were to rise again. And fight for something. For a paradigm shift. For a different future.
Jenny Holzer’s best truism is: Protect me from what I want.
Next time it’s number 33: Monopoly. Edizione Serenissima. ¡Adiós, compañero, hasta pronto!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 31:

Happy New Year!

We, or rather one of us, was in China. In Nanjing, Chengdu and Lijiang. And in Taiwan. A few were in Bangkok and others in Tokyo. And some stayed at home and watched the world from there: The (rented Miista) boots of Rama Duwaji, Zohran Mamdani’s wonderful wife, at his glamorous inauguration as mayor of New York with Bernie Sanders and AOC.

Or the cool blue sunglasses worn by Emmanuel Macron in Davos. The phone of Lily Collins, Phil’s daughter: is she taking a photo or photographing herself being photographed in Paris, photographing shoes? Or is it not a phone at all, but a weapon? Is she even in Paris? What kind of paranoid questions are these? In the age of the metaverse, where reality no longer seems to exist, you have to provide answers quickly so that the question immediately becomes suspect.

Otherwise, it’s pretty quiet here. The weekly markets are bustling, with the small Radichetto and especially the elongated, crisp Radicchio from Treviso currently in season, which is widely celebrated here. Especially at the farmers’ market on Friday mornings on the Lido (on the lagoon side opposite the Palazzo del Cinema) and Thursday mornings in Venice near the train station. There are about 15 stands, some also sell organic stuff. And there are lots of artichokes at the moment, not yet the purple ones from San Erasmo, but soon. Otherwise, people talk a lot about the weather. It was cold for a short while, but sunny, then it became increasingly foggy and rain is forecast for the next few days. It poured with rain Sunday morning, but then this happened: at 2 o’clock sharp, the most glorious sun came out and the light was simply incredible. Even though the forecast was exclusively clouds and rain! Who decides that? And why?
A flock of pigeons immediately settled on the roof of the church of San Nicolo to keep their bones healthy. (Vitamin D deficiency in birds can lead to a loss of calcium absorption and bone mineralisation!) And Monday, 70% rain is forecast, but then there will be several hours of sunshine. So which is it now?

Rain is good for the air. And – believe it or not – the air here isn’t particularly great. It’s not as bad as in Bassano del Grappa, which is a real dump. Or even worse is Milan. Hell. Here it’s often RED: Poor. Or BROWN: Very Poor. The only thing worse is PURPLE: Extremely. Just Extremely. Nothing else. People are advised not to go outside. When it’s RED, you shouldn’t do any sport outside. Paranoia? Well, opinions differ on that. In an interesting interview with cardiologist Thomas Münzel, a charming senior professor from Mainz in Hesse who himself suffers from high blood pressure, we learn that “...if we only look at the lifestyle of the individual, at what he or she can do for their heart, we obscure where the real danger lies: in the world around us.” For him, where he lives, the main cause is (aircraft) noise, of which he is “one hundred per cent convinced.” But still doesn’t move away. So German. And according to Münzel it’s not so much the source of the noise that matters, but rather how much the noise annoys you. Haha! “... if we keep waking up, the annoyance is particularly severe, and so is the stress on our bodies.” True. But then there’s something else, for those who aren’t annoyed or waking up: FINE DUST. A killer. An invisible poison. It’s produced when fossil fuels are burned. Petrol, coal or WOOD.

Here we go: The smaller the particles, the deeper they penetrate the body via the lungs when breathing. They trigger inflammatory processes in the blood. They damage the heart and cause cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia and metabolic disorders. PURPLE. Extremely. When wood is burned, particles of various sizes are released: PM10, PM2.5 and the very dangerous ultrafine dust with a diameter of less than 0.1 micrometres. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) often adhere to the particles and make the damage even worse. In the SPIEGEL, where the interview with the professor appeared, two days later, the expert on fine dust, Prof. Dr. Achim Dittler, said: If the emission limits for vehicles were applied to fireplaces, measures would have to be taken on millions of systems, and nobody wants that. Instead, the problem is being ignored. “What we have achieved with great effort in improving air quality with cars, we are undoing with wood-burning stoves. Especially in residential areas. Wood burning is the dirtiest and most harmful heating method.” Well, great. Especially in inversion weather conditions, which seem to be a permanent phenomenon here, and which is even worse further towards the Alps. Sorry, Bassano del Grappa.

Normally, the air temperature gradually decreases with increasing altitude, but during an inversion, this relationship is reversed. Particularly in winter, when the ground is cold and the smog is warm.

In the National Library of Medicine, you can find an interesting text that shows how the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet capture elements of the environmental changes through aerosols influence during the Industrial Revolution. Through smog. And inversion.

Here the basilica Santa Maria della Salute by Claude Monet:

One would naturally like to believe that the air is much better in the countryside. Forget it. Slurry and animal farming release ammonia and nitrate-containing particles. Hell. PURPLE. Extremely. Professor Münzel hates it. And he calls for cities with a lot of green spaces. They absorb noise and all the invisible junk and reduce the temperature. So stop sealing! Wherever. Here, there, in the countryside, in the city. No more. Münzel: “High cholesterol levels cause an estimated four million deaths worldwide every year. Air pollution, on the other hand, causes eight million.”

Last year’s 19th Architecture Biennale Intelligens sold a total of 298,000 tickets. That is 5% more than in 2023. In addition to the 17,584 visitors who attended the preview. If you include them, it is the most visited Biennale Architettura of all time. But only if you do. Because there was no preview for the record-breaking 2021 Biennale curated by Hashim Sarkis, ‘How Will We Live Together?’ It was during the pandemic

… are the artistic directors of the 20th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2027. We welcome them! (Things can’t get any worse! Haha.) The two have already won every conceivable award in the world. Wang Shu also won the Pritzker in 2012 and was even on the jury from 2018 to 2024. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Venice Biennale, said that Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu would be “combining cultural responsibility with experimental genius.” Okay. They themselves wrote in their statement: “Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality and over-commercialisation tends to be merely popular and short-lived. This phenomenon changes rapidly in order to survive, breaking away from the connection with the real place. It will lead to the death of architecture. Therefore, architecture becomes a kind of delusional expression about the future.” Yes, correct. “For this reason, in the face of the real crisis of this world, insisting on a simple and true concept and method of architecture has a special value.” Hm, well,… Yes and no. And maybe. Let’s see. We are looking forward to it! Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu are from China. China is everywhere right now. Everyone has suddenly a ‘Very Chinese time’ in their lives.

What’s the air like in China? In the northern Chinese province of Hebei, coal heating and wood-burning stoves were banned in 2017. The central government has laid natural gas pipelines. This was because the air in Beijing itself needed to be improved and Hebei province surrounds the capital. It worked: in 2025, there was only one day with severe air pollution, which is a 98% decrease compared to 2013. The authorities are celebrating Beijing’s ‘fight for blue skies’. But it is all BROWWWWWN: Very Poooor! PURPLE doesn’t even exist in China. AND: gas has become so expensive that rural residents in Hebei are rationing their heating. They are freezing at outdoor temperatures of -15 degrees. Extremely.

First up is the Art Biennale, which opens on 9 May. It is being curated, or rather was curated, by Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to hold this position. Sadly and tragically, Koyo Kouoh died six months after her nomination. Her team has now taken over. The title is ‘In Minor Keys’, a reference to music. We are really looking forward to it. Our newsletter will then appear regularly again. And with more video clips and podcasts. And, as a little surprise, a monthly publication. In print. We are currently working on that. Next time it’s number 32. Hola, compañeros, nos vemos pronto!

The Unlikely Guide un-stacks the Venetian lagoon every week and celebrates it in all its complexity. It’s a declaration of love to the local people, to the fish, the artichokes, to the Lido, to Murano, to Sant’Erasmo, and to the mud. It is composed under various headlines and features science fiction, fiction, Biennale reports, and the History Channel with stories and myths from the lagoon.

Here we go, Number 30:

our last critical edition (for now)

Ciao! First of all, this is our last critical edition, the third, the 30th overall. Then there will be two more non-critical or quarter-critical editions, rather irregular, and then we will take a break with the newsletter. We don’t know how long yet. But during the break, we will take care of the lists. We have promised them often, but so far only one has been published: the Scarpa list(s) in the notes.
Today, however, we will focus on the Biennale. Not the current Biennale, perhaps a little, but the institution itself. It influences all areas of life here. It is an incredible force. A machine. It determines the rhythm of many people’s lives. In May, when the art or architecture exhibitions open, or from late August to early September, when the Mostra takes place on the Lido, everything is in a state of emergency. That is when the money is made. Everything has to work. And at the same time, or perhaps precisely because of this, there are many Venetians who have never been to a Biennale.

It was founded in 1895 as the ‘Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia’ and was one of the world’s first international art exhibitions. And there was the first scandal. ‘Il Supremo Convegno’ depicted the interior of a church with five naked women surrounding the open coffin of an imaginary dead Don Juan. The Patriarch and later Pope Pius X condemned Giacomo Grosso’s work. However, a commission appointed by the mayor saw no violation of public morality, and the painting was exhibited well hidden. But the public flocked to see the scandal. The painting was purchased by an American company and was lost in a fire on the ship that transported it across the Atlantic. So, initially works were sold at the Biennale; the German pavilion was the Bavarian one, and only over time did other disciplines join in. The architecture alternates with art every two years, and the film festival on the Lido, called ‘Mostra,’ has been around since 1932, making it the oldest annual film festival in the world. Then, in the 1930s through the 1980s, dance, theater, and music were added. Oh yes, and the carnival, which we mentioned earlier. And now there will be a large Biennale archive, which was previously in Mestre.

The office or headquarters is near St. Mark’s Square. You go down the small alley near Louis Vuitton towards the Grand Canal (if you come from Hermes or Chanel, turn left, from Prada or Valentino, turn right), directly opposite the Punta da Dogana. Not necessarily our favorite part of Venice. There is also a Biennale café by the water, l’ombra del Leone (the Shadow of the Lion). And a gondola harbor in front of it. Next to it is the construction site of the Hotel Bauer, with a large sign saying that they will be back. Last March.

The city of Venice provides public spaces such as the Giardini or Arsenale. Or palazzi that are still in their possession, while the Biennale Foundation organizes everything. If someone holds an event or exhibition somewhere that mentions the Biennale, they take great care to ensure that they are paid. It’s all well-rehearsed. Art and architecture are organized by the same people. Set-up, dismantling, transport. Understandably, they are quite strict. But also mostly overwhelmed. A lot of bureaucracy, lots of email accounts in cc. When Team Ratti, Carlo Ratti, messed up the organization with bots and AI during the preparations, the old hands stepped in neatly. (Mi scusi se ci faccio risparmiare un po’ di tempo.) Apparently, in the end, there was nothing but shouting. Was the explanatory app from SUB ever finished? We never saw anyone using it.
The president and board of the Biennale are appointed partly by the Italian Ministry of Culture and partly “in consultation with the local authorities of Venice, so that it is semi-autonomous but still bound to both the city and the state.” Hm, okay.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has been president of the foundation for a year and will remain so until March 2028. He is a journalist and writer whose grandfather was already a neo-fascist. He himself was also a leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), Mussolini’s successor party, and the Alleanza Nazionale. But Buttafuoco is somehow interesting. Not only has he written several novels and directed two theater festivals, but he has also converted to Islam. His name is Giafar al-Siqilli, just as Muhammad Ali was actually named Cassius Clay, and Yusuf Islam was Cat Stevens. As we said, Buttafuoco is interesting. At times, Islam was a challenge for his political career. After the MSI became AN in 1995 and the AN merged with Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, which had previously been allied with the AN. Giorgia Meloni, today prime minister and at the time a prominent member of the AN and the PdL, is said to have rejected Buttafuoco’s attempt to run as the Lega Nord’s candidate for governor of Sicily in 2015. The candidacy of a Muslim would send the wrong signals. Buttafuoco is more quiet on the topic now and wants to become prime minister himself.
In addition, the vice president of the Biennale is an old acquaintance who is less interesting: Luigi Brugnaro. Primarily an entrepreneur and, since 2015, mayor of Venice. He is facing charges for buying a piece of land cheaply, then changing the laws and reselling it at a high price. Really high. Brugnaro is chairman of his own party, Coraggio Italia. He’s probably not a fascist. Just corrupt. And somehow ridiculous. Prince Carnival. Venice deserves someone else. Or needs someone else. Very much so. Also on the Biennale board is Luca Zaia, a long-time member of the Lega Nord and currently president of the Veneto region. Although he is in the Lega (like Buttafuoco), Matteo Salvini’s fascist party, Zaia is sometimes good for surprisingly moderate or even progressive remarks. We don’t know much about Tamara Gregoretti. She has also been on the board since last year. Although, she was appointed by the Italian Minister of Culture. Does that say enough?
Perhaps Giafar al-Siqilli, Giafar the Sicilian, is so interesting because we know a few things about him, but so much remains unknown. He comes from Sicily. He emphasises the Muslim history of Sicily and took his new name in honour of Jafar ibn Muhammad, the conqueror of Syracuse in 878. He studied philosophy in Catania. And at some point he became a traditionalist. Traditionalism assumes that a single original, metaphysical truth is the source of all major world religions. There are many different interpretations, a lot of esotericism, mysticism, to which all religions can be traced back, but always gloomy. There is a lot of anti-Americanism. But essentially, as we understand it, in its more progressive forms it is a critique of modern society for its libertine individualism.
It is unclear when Buttafuoco became a traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles entitled Fogli consanguinei (Blood-Related Pages) with Edizioni di Ar, a publishing house named in honour of the Gruppo di Ur, to which Julius Evola once belonged. The philosopher who stood trial in 1951 for glorifying fascism, denied being a fascist and described himself as a ‘Superfaschista’. After the Second World War, Evola became the most important ideologue of the Italian radical right. His philosophy is anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal and anti-democratic. New Age spirituality and complete rejection of modern society.

Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has published at least one novel or collection of essays almost every year since 2002. Islam plays a role in several of them. His first novel, Le uova del drago (The Dragon’s Eggs), published in 2005, is set in Sicily during the war. The dragon’s eggs were eleven Muslim militiamen of various nationalities under the command of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. They fought alongside Italian fascists and a glamorous German spy against the Allied invasion. L’ultima del Diavolo (The Devil’s Last Woman) from 2008, which Buttafuoco called “the first Muslim novel in Italian,” alternates between the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the present. The devil is after documents about the monk Bahira because he wants to prevent Muhammad’s Christian legitimisation. The devil. And the Americans are allied with the devil. Alexander Dugin might like it. Or perhaps he prefers Cabaret Voltaire. L’Islam, il sacro, l’Occidente (Islam, the Sacred, the West) from 2008. Buttafuoco’s most traditionalist book. It attacks modernity and the allegedly false worship of rationality and science, as well as the illusion of freedom and democracy. Islam is misunderstood because of the ‘falsely liberal’ and American-dominated press.
Then came a completely different book about women and how to seduce them: Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them). Okay.
And in 2011, Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and raised by the Sultan as a military commander. Later, he returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his strict Catholic brother. That was the end of his strongly Islamic phase. Only Il feroce Saracino. La guerra dell’Islam. Il califfo alle porte di Roma (The Ferocious Saracen: The War of Islam, The Caliph at the Gates of Rome) from 2015 deals with terrorism. As a struggle within Islam. Good and bad Muslims. And then there is Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori. Goethe e l’Islam (Flowers bloom beneath his footsteps: Goethe and Islam) from 2019. With Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre. It is about J.W. von Goethe’s encounter with Islam, which ends with his (alleged) conversion. The title is a line from Mahomet’s Song (1817/21).

Buttafuoco was never known outside Italy. His novels have not been translated. Here he was known from television (Canale 5). And for his daily column in Il Foglio. From around 2010 onwards, his criticism of the centre-right and Berlusconi grew. This culminated in December 2012, after Berlusconi’s resignation, in a page in la Repubblica: “...Berlusconism, which ended in an incredible failure after the avant-garde and the archetypical Italy. In strategy, tactics and vision. The only legacy Silvio Berlusconi has left behind is ultimately that of a destroyed right wing.” That was also the end of his column. He had turned against his own people, and they now called him a ‘fascist Islamist,’ a ‘leaflet journalist’ whose novels had never been reviewed. Later, he wrote a book about Berlusconi, which reads almost like irony. Berlusconi, the embodiment of consumerism and individualism. And does Pietrangelo Buttafuoco like football?

Two weeks ago, on November 7, President Buttafuoco presented in Venice a new series of events: la Biennale della Parola. The keynote speaker was Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher and former mayor of Venice whom we described in the last issue.
“Nothing will ever be the same again once the fundamental principles of your culture have been destroyed.” This sombre statement by Cacciari kicked off the event. And it was introduced by the Patriarch of Venice, Monsignor Francesco Moraglia. The title: The Death of Jus Belli. Wars and Peace. Immanuel Kant, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt. It was probably a cheerful evening.
Europe would lose its legal and moral roots, the future generation would have to establish a new international law. And President Buttafuoco’s message was that the Biennale must be a ‘guardian of freedom.’ There it is again, that word: ‘freedom.’ Topics such as war and peace, which nowadays were almost taboo (really?) in public debate, must be discussed again. And Buttafuoco interesting enough recalled a Catholic, Giorgio La Pira, and a Communist, Pio La Torre. La Pira was mayor of Florence and helped draft the Italian constitution after the war; La Torre was a member of parliament from Palermo and was murdered in 1982, by his main opponents, the Mafia.

“The Biennale works in the service of the word,” Buttafuoco said on November 7, “and we are proud of what we achieve every day in our work.”
What do words matter when Bahrain wins the Golden Lion? When the United Arab Emirates, –now admittedly the main culprit in the Sudan war–have a pavilion? In 2021, at the 17th Architecture Biennale, the UAE won the Golden Lion for Wetland. Qatar? Gets its own pavilion in the Giardini. Right at the entrance. For money. What good are these words?
That’s it for today. Next time it’s number 31. And after 32, we take some time off! Ciao fioi, a presto!

Here we go, Number 29 :

about this and that (weddings)

Ciao! Have you heard about Mimmo? A cheerful dolphin that has been splashing around in the middle of the lagoon for several weeks now. Between San Giorgio Maggiore and St. Mark’s Square. The dolphin is said to have lost his way. They have named him ‘Mimmo’, the diminutive form of Domenico, which in turn means ‘belonging to the Lord.’ Walter Benjamin once wrote that animals look so sad because humans give them names. There is a great deal of concern for the bottlenose dolphin. delfino Mimmo@Facebook: “Let’s save Mimmo”. “The dolphin swimming in St. Mark’s Basin: he must return to the open sea!” “Venice is mobilizing to save Mimmo.” Or great headlines like: “Venice, Mimmo, and the tourists’ big misunderstanding: dolphins don’t laugh.” Why not?

During the pandemic, images of dolphins in the canals appeared everywhere. With no ships moving around and the lagoon actually very clean, dolphins were said to be everywhere. That wasn’t true, but it was somehow a positive ‘as if.’ And it convinced a few people that there are too many ships here. Too many large ships. Too many ships with deep drafts. Warnings about them are now also being issued in connection with Mimmo.

Why Mimmo, actually? Mimmo Paladino? A famous artist who created the Italian pavilion at the Biennale in 2015. But he has nothing to do with dolphins. More with horses. And then there’s Mimmo Rotella, an artist who made poster tear-offs. In the tradition of the Cubists. Movie posters were torn off, revealing other posters underneath. He invented the technique. It’s called ‘decollage.’ Some tigers and very often Marilyn Monroe can be seen. In 1964, he was invited to the Biennale. In his honor, or perhaps to promote his hometown of Catanzaro in Calabria, the Mimmo Rotella Prize is awarded annually at the Mostra, the film Biennale. To a director and an actor. Donald Sutherland has been given it, as have Al Pacino and George Clooney. Oliver Stone has also won it. But so far, no dolphin has.

“The risk of ‘uncontrolled’ tourism.” Despite calls for caution, taxi boats of course offer tours to take selfies with Mimmo. Some try to lure him with balloons or food, which is totally idiotic. And the ship’s propellers are obviously a threat, while the noise of the engines can impair its ability to orient itself. And to communicate with other dolphins. If there are any. Mimmo seems to be quite on his own. The coast guard and the CERT – Cetacean’s Stranding Emergency Response Team in Legnaro have been observing Mimmo from the beginning. He eats regularly and shows normal swimming and breathing movements. And they plan to accompany him to the open sea. Where he belongs. In a flock.

Posters have been put up in the municipalities of Venice and Milan about the marriage: The Groom is born in Venice in 1944, resident in Venice. The bride, Chiara Patriarca, is born in Trieste in 1973, resident in Milan. Massimo Cacciari is an academic philosopher and a high-profile intellectual in contemporary Italy. AND: he was the mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000 and from 2005 to 2010. Yes, Venice once had a good mayor.
Massimo Cacciari taught at the University of Architecture in Venice in 1970/71, where he met Manfredo Tafuri. In 1980, he was given a permanent position, and in 1985, he was appointed to the field of aesthetics. In 2002, he founded the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Milan. At the same time, from 1998 to 2006, he was director of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Academy of Architecture at the University of Lugano. When he was young, Massimo Cacciari was, of course, a communist. In principle, a Eurocommunist. And soon provincial secretary of the chemical workers’ union. From 1976 to 1983, he was a member of parliament. In 1984, after the death of Enrico Berlinguer, he left the PCI.
In 1993, Cacciari became an independent candidate for the left-wing Alleanza dei Progressisti (Alliance of Progressives) and was elected mayor of Venice with 42.3% of the vote in the first round and 55.4% in the runoff. In 1997, he was re-elected in the first round with 64.6%. Supported by Romano Prodi’s L’Ulivo (The Olive Tree), a broad center-left alliance. Cacciari became a leading figure of Centocittà (one hundred cities), a network of mayors. Centocittà merged with the social-liberal I Democratici in 1999. In the same year, Cacciari was elected to the EU Parliament for the I Democratici and resigned as mayor. He was considered a contender for something bigger at the time, but was defeated in 2000, in the race for the presidency of Veneto by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia candidate. Cacciari gave up his seat in the EU Parliament and became a member of the regional parliament. In 2005, he made a surprise announcement that he wanted to become mayor of Venice again.
Cacciari’s political career also shows how the left, centrists, and right have constantly split, united, and reformed. In this election, he ran against former prosecutor Felice Casson, who was backed by the social democratic DS, the communists, and the Greens. Behind Cacciari was the social-liberal Democrazia è Libertà – La Margherita, into which his I Democratici had merged or been absorbed. In the first round, the former prosecutor Casson won 37.7% and Cacciari only 23.2%. It looked like defeat. But then he had a 1,300-vote lead in the runoff and won with 50.5%. It was a complicated coalition of the center and the left, and by 2009 he was fed up. He wanted to return to the university and not run again in 2010. His successor was Giorgio Orsoni, who surprisingly won the election against Berlusconi’s candidate.

Shortly thereafter, Massimo Cacciari presented the manifesto Verso Nord, un’ Italia più vicina (Towards the North, a closer Italy), which was aimed at those who were disappointed with both the Partito Democratico (actually the successor to Prodi’s Olive Tree, now led by Elly Schlein) and the Popolo della Libertà (Berlusconi 2009-2013, a merger of Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale) but also distanced from the Lega Nord. In October 2010, the Verso Nord party was founded. Then things became increasingly confusing with splits and the founding of Future Italy, Verso la Terra Repubblica (Toward the Third Republic) (VTR), and Mario Monti’s Scelta Civica (Civic Choice). No joke.
But during all this time in active politics, during all the elections, struggles, ups and downs, Massimo Cacciari wrote philosophical and political essays, authored books, and also processed what he had just learned.
Alessandro Carrera, an Italian poet, essayist, and songwriter, is the editor of the English translation of Cacciari’s 2009 book The Unpolitical. He has written a beautiful and very inspiring introduction to it. Carrera explains how much Cacciari thinks about the city, but also how he uses the uniqueness of Venice as an archipelago, as ‘two cities’ (Mestre and the historic center), as an explanation or template for Europe and the world.

In another essay, ‘Venezia possibile’ (Possible Venice, 1989), he had already tried to connect the threads of his philosophy to Venice. What does ‘Save Venice!’ mean, Cacciari asks? The cry is so old because the very existence of Venice has always been exceptional. For centuries, the geopolitical order of Europe has seen nothing more unnatural than Venice’s government, ruling class and power. During the eighteenth century, however, Venice lost the capability of representing itself to the eyes of the world. The subsequent transformation of Venice into a tourist attraction coincided with the universal cry of ‘Save Venice!’ addressed to no one in particular. But Venice is a living organism, and not, we may say, the European franchise of the Las Vegas version of itself (when the Venetian Hotel opened in Las Vegas, Cacciari was invited as the mayor of the ‘real’ Venice; he obviously declined). (…)

At the end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), Marco Polo is having his usual conversation with Kublai Khan. This time he is about to say something that he has never admitted before. The hundreds of strange cities that he has described to the emperor were just the masks of Venice. In his reports to the emperor, Marco Polo evoked no other city than Venice. Cacciari’s theoretical, political, and literary essays have traveled a long way, but Cacciari’s writing, in its ambitious totality, perhaps has no other desire than to be the written metamorphosis of Venice’s thousand patterns.”

Carrera’s Introduction to The Unpolitical by Massimo Cacciari, 2009

As mayor, you automatically become president of the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice and vice president of the foundation for the Biennale. Cacciari (who also wrote libretti for his friend, the composer Luigi Nono) naturally mastered these tasks brilliantly, while the current mayor comes across as rather clueless and amateurish. This is evident in the dispute at La Fenice, in all the decisions surrounding Qatar’s new pavilion, and at the Bezos wedding. Those who pay or have power are waved through, no matter how damaging it is to Venice.

Thanks to the protests here, Jeff Bezos’ wedding has become a symbol of the obscenity, excess, and shamelessness of the wealthiest 1%. And Venice is becoming a symbol of total commercialization, corruption, and venality. This is what Cacciari and architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri always warned about. But it’s not just Bezos alone, it’s his guest list and especially people like wrap dress inventor Diane von Fürstenberg, who are supposedly Venetians, surely love Venice and are trying to ‘save’ it. But then help Bezos justify and cover up his utter shamelessness. With supposed investments and donations. They are only saving themselves. The curator of the 19th Architecture Biennale, Carlo Ratti, invited von Fürstenberg to make a contribution: “… Diane von Fürstenberg will explore how Venice can turn its femininity into resilience.” The result is a few flags along the promenade in the Giardini leading to the main pavilion, which is currently undergoing renovation, and a booklet. This is full of Venice kitsch, certainly well-intentioned, “Venice is female,” and there are all kinds of goddesses presenting Venice’s great inventions.

Von Fürstenberg was the much-coveted It couple in New York in the 1970s with her husband Egon. So she should really know better. In 1973, Linda Francke published a malicious article in New York Magazine in which she described the von Fürstenbergs as “New York’s reigning glory couple.” But then wrote that Prince Egon and Princess Diane (the title came from 15th-century Germany, the money from Egon’s mother Clara Agnelli from the Fiat fortune) would claim to be 26 years old: “He looks like it, she doesn’t!” according to Francke. And then there’s their emptiness, their promiscuity (’Egon von First-in-bed’), and their shamelessness: Euro-trash!

That was too much for Diane, and she divorced the Prince. At that point, she already had two children and was a famous fashion designer. Later she married Barry Diller, the billionaire who founded Fox News with Rupert Murdoch and became an important and wealthy media mogul with Tele-Shopping or companies like Expedia, and Vimeo. New York is the other island city that has become too expensive for ordinary locals. People like Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, and Barry Diller don’t care about that. They call themselves Democrats, but they don’t really want to pay taxes. And anyone who advocates for more justice is woke. Or ultra-left. Powerful PACs fighting Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral race have just raised over $40 million. And in line with election filings, Barry Diller has made substantial donations to a committee called ‘Repair the Metropolis,’ (haha) which certainly supports Andrew Cuomo. The elections are tomorrow. We’ll see if it has made a difference. Diller also defended his “very, very dear, loving friend” Jeff Bezos for undermining the Washington Post’s endorsement for Kamala Harris. And they came here to his wedding. Diane connected local artisans, such as the exclusive Murano glassmakers ‘Laguna B,’ and did some charity work. Ma non basta!
And that’s it for now, and next time it’s number 30, the third critical one!
Ciao fioi, a presto!

Here we go, Number 28 :

Mouths of Truth

Ciao, come va? Qualche lamentela? Any complaints?
Here, there was a time when citizens could express their laments anonymously by placing handwritten notes in designated (letter) boxes. The government then responded to each individual complaint. Everyone felt heard and respected. There was no need to mobilize the masses. These bocche di leone (lion’s mouths) were scattered throughout the city during the Renaissance. Each one had a face. Often that of a lion, with a slit for a mouth into which the letters disappeared. The oldest one is at the Doge’s Palace. It dates back to 1618 and is still intact. Somehow.

Each ministry had its own boxes with different topics. Taxes, market cheating, or trade conflicts. A reflection of the oligarchic republic under the doges. The ‘mouths of truth’ in the wall of the church of Santa Maria della Visitazione in Dorsoduro was for complaints about garbage in the canals: Relating to public health. To protect the collective from the individual. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, many cities had systems for anonymous denunciations. This was part of how the legal system worked throughout Europe, writes Filippo de Vivo in ‘Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics’. A legal system known as the Inquisition system. However, in Venice, the law only allowed anonymous denunciations against public officials, not private individuals. In order to “at least theoretically encourage denunciations against government officials who abused their power,” according to de Vivo. This contributed to the strength of the republic because the opinions of ordinary Venetians were taken seriously. Signed notes took precedence. Each one was read and processed by the relevant state authority. Complaints that were additionally supported by witnesses often went to the most important government body, the Council of Ten. Brunetti’s predecessors then investigated. The consequences could also be severe for the accuser if it turned out to be a lie. Imprisonment in the city’s notorious prisons, banishment, or even death were on the cards. In 1869, Mark Twain saw only the downside:

“At the head of the Giant’s Staircase, where Marino Faliero was beheaded, and where the Doges were crowned in ancient times, two small slits in the stone wall were pointed out—two harmless, insignificant orifices that would never attract a stranger’s attention—yet these were the terrible Lions’ Mouths! The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during their occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which went the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to walk the Bridge of Sighs and descend into the dungeon which none entered and hoped to see the sun again. This was in the old days when the Patricians alone governed Venice—the common herd had no vote and no voice. There were one thousand five hundred Patricians; from these, three hundred Senators were chosen; from the Senators a Doge and a Council of Ten were selected, and by secret ballot the Ten chose from their own number a Council of Three. All these were Government spies, then, and every spy was under surveillance himself—men spoke in whispers in Venice, and no man trusted his neighbor—not always his own brother. No man knew who the Council of Three were—not even the Senate, not even the Doge; the members of that dread tribunal met at night in a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed from head to foot in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other, unless by voice.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869

Filippo de Vivo writes that secrecy was an overriding principle of Venetian governance. (Also because it was so difficult to maintain in practice):

…secrecy was in fact inherent in Venice’s republican ideology. The manipulation of communication helped secure harmony in the ruling councils. More importantly, it made disagreement unspeakable, in the hope of cancelling it from official and private language and so of erasing it from people’s mind—as if it had never existed. (…)
Traiano Boccalini (a famous satirist who died in Venice in 1613) firmly placed secrecy at the heart of the myth of Venice. His Ragguagli (News-sheet from Parnassus, 1612) include a dispute in Parnassus over the reasons for Venice’s greatness, presided over by no less than Lady Venetian Liberty herself. The various opinions recapitulated the myth’s various elements as formulated ever since Contarini: constitutional stability; excellence of the city’s site; prudence justice. Yet none of these explanations satisfied Lady Liberty, until a fictional of the ruling class; harmony between nobility and ordinary citizens; fairness of Ermolao Barbaro—a famous Venetian statesman and diplomat as well as a humanist—pointed to secrecy. This at last was the correct answer, she said, because secrecy was vital to good government. Secrecy was tantamount to serenity. The greatest secret of all did not concern the subject matter of council debates, but the fact that there were debates at all.

Filippo de Vivo, ‘Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics’, 2007

The book ‘Venezia Fake’ has just been published. And like so many authors and historians before, it deals with the gap between the myth and reality of Venice. Contradictions and hypocrisies are exposed, along with the multitude of hoaxes that Venice wouldn’t need at all. Really?
“Venice is a city like no other in the world... but it is also not immune to legends. Myths, invented anecdotes, imaginative interpretations: from the ‘drinkable’ water of the Grand Canal to the curse of Ca’ Dario, from the (fake) battle of Salvore to the lion of St. Mark...”
But we would argue there is no gap between the myth and reality. This is mythopoesis. Or la Serenissima. The Serene One. A collective self-deception through consciously and creatively conceived self-representation. A formal visualisation of political ideals. One only has to visit the countless museums, starting with the Accademia. The old paintings attempt to translate political ideals. Common values are defined here. Justice and wisdom as the embodiment of the highest virtues of the republic. These are not hoaxes. Or if they are, then good ones. And so almost all half-truths, inventions, fictions and anecdotes can be seen as iconographic shifts. Not to secure an advantage, but to tell a story to a broad audience.
Because Venice’s ruling class wanted Saint Mark as the patron saint of their economic status, they smuggled his dead corpse from Egypt to Venice. Eight centuries after his death! The thieves hid him under pork and vegetables. According to a French monk, Saint Mark’s cadaver was safely stored in “one of the large columns.” But when the chapel of St Mark’s Basilica was rebuilt in 1063, they could not find anything. It was not until 30 years later that the body surprisingly reappeared (with his arm protruding from a column). Then they buried Saint Mark in the high altar in the chapel. Good stories, aren’t they? Especially the one about the hand sticking out of the column. Some 1,000 years after his death. But important nonetheless.

How about the winged lion in St Mark’s Square? The ‘Venice Lion’. Is it from a monument to the god Sandon in Tarsus in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia? One thing seems certain: Marco Polo had it in his luggage. In 2024, researchers here at the university discovered that the statue is most likely a re-assembly. It might date from the Tang dynasty (609–907 AD) and was made from copper mined in the lower Yangtze basin, the Blue River in southern China.
Or how about the story that Venice wanted to move to Constantinople? The entire city! In 1222, Doge Pietro Ziani is said to have seriously proposed this to the Senate. To abandon Venice completely. At that time, it was far away from the centre of events and, moreover, had to be laboriously reclaimed from the sea. Water and swamps everywhere. It could have been swallowed up at any time, just as the two island cities in the lagoon, Ammiana and Costanziaca, had been devoured. So Ziani’s proposal was debated at length. In the end, only one voice is said to have rejected it. That of Angelo Falier.

Yesterday, the Music Biennale came to an end with a magnificent concert by Moore Mother! But first things first. ‘La Stella Dentro’ was the title of the 69th (!!) International Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale, and ‘The Star Within’ was “dedicated to the theme of cosmic music”. Okay. The great Meredith Monk received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and performed several times at the Teatro Malibran accompanied by her vocal ensemble. There was also a video installation of hers on display for a while. Everyone said the entire festival was great. It was directed by Caterina Barbieri, ran for two weeks, and Saturday was the last night.
You walked past the Arsenale halls, which were closed from 6 p.m. and where the IntelliGens Architecture Biennale is still running until the end of November. Or you could take a ride to the Teatro alle Tese with an extra-long golf cart. It ‘s directly behind the large café or kiosk by the water, where a huge rusty crane is currently wrapped in wood. And behind it is the Espresso Bar by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who won the Golden Lion for Architecture. Behind a barrier, as if it were another construction site. It’s dark and dilapidated and looks like you can no longer get coffee there. Even though it was supposed to be a ‘symbol of transformation – through the cleaning of the canals’. And the best espresso in Italy (!!) was supposed to be made there. To prove ‘that environmental challenges can be woven into the fabric of daily life.’ Apparently, that didn’t work out. And the coffee was fairly average. It didn’t bother the music theatre guests. They obediently queued up at the kiosk opposite to get a spritz. Or a Moretti. They looked different from the usual Biennale audience. More hip. Some even more hipster. And pleasantly cheerful. Many knew each other. A lot of Italians. The space at the Teatro alle Tese is large and very beautiful. You thought, ah, sold out. It’s going to be packed. But it was pleasantly airy. You could walk around. Outside and inside, because there were actually three concerts and a DJ set.
First up was Agnese Menguzzato with her custom-made eight-string electric guitar. In her site-specific performance entitled ‘Undici’ (Eleven), she is said to have imitated Renaissance lute music. Hard to tell. Overall, it was a very pleasant performance to watch. With lots of fog and moving spotlights. A little sci-fi. Everything was fine for taking pictures and filming. People sat and lay on the floor. It was all a bit low-energy. But pretty. Menguzzato lives in Berlin and has made an EP called ‘Scusa’. Sorry.
Then it was Morgana’s turn with ‘Before Darkness Gated Us’. A one-person live performance “that explores memory, loss and unstable perception.” That’s right. Maybe too much energy here? But good somehow. Noises, samples, electronics. “Unfolding as a living structure, it continually shifts between collapse and recomposition.” Absolutely right. Really good.

Each set lasted about 45 minutes, and then Moor Mother came on with ‘Shinkolobwe’. It just started like that. A seamless transition from stage setup to concert. The title comes from a mine in the Congo that was operated by the Belgian colonial regime. Uranium for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is said to have been produced there. Moor Mother is Moor Mother herself, whose real name is Camae Ayewa, and then there’s trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, who does play other (weirder) instruments too. Simon Sieger is on the trombone, but also on the piano, organ and flute, and he sings. Then there’s Aho Ssan on electronics and eventually Moor Mother, singing, speaking, shouting and on percussion and electronics. They mix analogue instruments (including all kinds of drums, bells and cymbals) with experimental electronics. Spoken word, archive material and ancestral lamentations. Ancestral lamentations from the future, too. Shinkolobwe is “a kind of disturbed archive which refracts, folds and collapses time upon itself,” according to the announcement. That sums it up well. The performance was also magnificent. Striking, pushing, blowing on a shell and a horn, simply looking away. Dropping something, doing it again, preparing, stamping. And again and again, ancestral lamentations. Extremely human.
Camae Ayewa is part of and co-leads many bands. She has also published a beautiful collection of poetry. But here’s the thing: together with Rasheedah Phillips, she is one half of the collective Black Quantum Futurism. And BQF is a literary and artistic collective. They say that quantum mechanical interpretations of time, space-time and of causality seem to correspond more closely with Afrocentric ideas than with Western ones. (CG. Jung would agree!) Rasheedah Phillips is also an Afrofuturist science fiction author and works as a housing attorney. And both of them are into community activism in combination with legal work:

Not long ago in the north of Philadelphia, in a predominantly black neighbourhood, houses were expropriated as part of a gentrification project. The people were sued out of their rented flats by estate agents and homeowners. And pushed into ghettos and to the outskirts of the city. A vibrant neighbourhood that had developed over decades was destroyed. The houses had to go. Because that’s exactly where shops and offices had to be. And, of course, exclusive housing. No one cared about the future of those who had lived there for a long time. They have no place in the linear time concept of eternal economic growth and cultural modernisation. BQF wants to rewrite this scenario. Rasheedah Phillips represents those affected in court with a team of lawyers. In 2021, they introduced the Renter’s Access Act to the Philadelphia City Council. Six months later, it came into law. It’s about the relation between law and time. Time as a factor in gentrification, speculation, bureaucracy. Displacement processes, time pressure, enforcement.
Camae, aka Moor Mother, and Rasheedah also supported those affected through social networking and neighbourhood assistance. To give people back self-confidence. The BQF duo also created or found non-commercialised spaces and locations where people could meet. Where they could talk in a relaxed atmosphere. And thus build alternative visions of the future. Or throw parties. Spaces that are disappearing for poor people. Against the constant pressure. Not only from the authorities. But also from neighbours, the bank. And they are searching for traces of the erased history of black communities. BQF understand this as forms of art. Great, isn’t it?

If the bocche di leone could speak again, they would give the mayor of Venice a piece of their mind. And he would not have been able to support Frank Gotthardt, Jeff Bezos, or Beatrice Venezi. Nor would he have been able to make such a killing with this property. Or he would have received a just punishment for the deal long ago. Buona settimana! Ciao fioi, a presto!

Here we go, Number 27 :

Antonia

Ciao! Nowadays, anything that isn’t a crisis or a disaster is overlooked and lost. Except when it comes to pets. Young dogs, for example. Suddenly, everybody pays attention. I must now shift from the ‘We’ to the ‘I’—just for a minute—because ‘I’ named my dog ‘Gramsci.’ It would be inappropriate for me to say ‘We,’ as we otherwise tend to do. In any case, my last dog was called ‘Toni’. It was the black and white one from Issue # 8 who fell in love with the cat from the Korean Pavilion. Toni’s French passport said ‘Antonia’. Gramsci’s Italian passport says Gramsci. Not ‘Antonio’. The Venetian passport officer was somehow more easygoing. At first he asked sternly, “Gramsci? Really?” But then he quickly smiled like Commissario Brunetti. Antonio Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party and spent much of the end of his life as a political prisoner under Mussolini’s fascists. He died shortly after his release in 1937. Gramsci was already a legend during his lifetime. But it was his Prison Notebooks that made him truly famous after his death. Almost every city in Italy has a street or square named after Gramsci.

On Tinder—so we’ve been told—there’s a young Italian woman who wants nothing more than to “talk about Gramsci at night.” With someone. Tinder is this platform for political discussions in real space. But let’s keep it short about Antonio; his message is somehow forgotten (by the left), but then again not (by the right).
It was first the French Nouvelle Droite and then the alt-right movement around Steve Bannon, Breitbart and Milo who internalised Gramsci’s downstream from culture. Angela Nagle describes this in her excellent 2017 book: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Political change follows cultural and social change. Or as my friend Colin MacCabe explains Gramsci: “You don’t make a revolution by seizing the Winter Palace. You make a revolution by changing people’s minds and their culture and they start seeing that the world can be different.”

“Today, the movement that has been most remarkably successful at changing the culture rather than the formal politics is the alt-light. They were the youthful bridge between the alt-right and mainstream Trumpism. Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics.”

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies, 3rd chapter: ‘Gramscians of the alt-light.’

But the right rarely refers to Gramsci. That’s why I named my dog Gramsci. So that everyone here, whether left or right, would shout: “Gramsci, Gramsci...” And it worked! Cars pull over, bicycles stop, photos are taken. And of course cookies. Every 150 meters Gramsci runs into a shop or bar to pick up some cookies. When Gramsci isn’t with me, no one will recognise me. Everyone loves dogs. Only children are more popular. But Gramsci loves everyone, too. As long as they give her a biscuit or throw something for her. A stick, a pine cone, a ball or a frisbee. She’ll bring it back. Infinitely.

It is not entirely clear why the left has forgotten Antonio Gramsci. With Eurocommunism and Enrico Berlinguer, he was on everyone’s lips. Berlinguer was Sardinian like Gramsci and he was also the leader of the Communist Party. We have mentioned him before. An elegant, polite man who was incredibly popular. He could explain everything, had charisma, and took from Gramsci the idea that you don’t win an election with 30% or 51%, but with 80%. And that’s why you have to make compromises in the right places. On the other hand, he drew clear boundaries. He would not participate in the exploitation of workers. In 1974, the PCI received 34% of the vote. Bettino Craxi, a Social Democrat, did not want to unite. So Berlinguer and the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro negotiated a historic compromise. It was a courageous move by Moro. And courageous by Berlinguer. And then, of all people, the ultra-leftist Brigate Rosse kidnapped Moro at that very moment. They did not want any compromises. And many of the Christian Democrats did not really want to govern with the Communists either. The Vatican threatened to excommunicate all PCI voters. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt threatened to expel Italy from NATO. Despite Enrico Berlinguer having broken with the Soviet Union. Like Gramsci breaking with Lenin. And Berlinguer did not say this in the Corriere della Sera, but in front of 5000 communist delegates in Moscow. It was the shortest applause ever measured in the Supreme Soviet.
The negotiations with the Brigate Rosse came to nothing. The terrorists killed Aldo Moro. The compromise was history.

When Enrico Berlinguer died unexpectedly in 1984, 1 million people attended his funeral in Rome. Marcello Mastroianni stood at his coffin. And the greatest Italian film directors. And including Bernardo Bertolucci, his brother Guiseppe and Roberto Benigni, they all made a film shot on 35mm about the funeral. Perhaps the lack of memory of Gramsci is also due to the fragmentary nature of the Prison Notebooks. And to Michel Foucault. To Horkheimer and Adorno and their pessimism about the positive use of propaganda. What would be suspicious is not the portrayal of reality as hell, they write, but the routine call to break out of it. But what‘s the point of endlessly describing hell if people are incapable of imagining an alternative? Slavoj Žižek recently gave a nice interview to the German magazine Die Zeit. He says many things that would apply to Gramsci, but especially to Berlinguer. That the left should be pragmatic and update its concept of exploitation. It should include the destruction of the environment, family values, and the fight against crime. In short: take conservative positions. “Because the conservatives violate these values; they have become obscene and violent.” Žižek blames the US Democrats most for the current misery. Because they twice spurned Bernie Sanders as a real alternative. He sees Sanders as a role model. So do we!
There’s no doubt that things are going to hell everywhere, but responding to one’s own helplessness with even more anger and loud posts is bad for the organs. And bad for the skin. Then we get even angrier. And in all the anger and panic, we fail to see what else is out there. Or was out there. Good things. Beautiful things. Unlikely things! Dogs. Nice people. Brave People. Gramsci, Berlinguer, Moro. Books. Films. Inventions. Everything that has proven itself and is perhaps being improved right now.
Venice is also called ‘La Serenissima’, the most serene, the relaxed. Now I’m going back to the I: Me in a different WE, though in a partially different WE. We realized the German Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale a few years ago. 2038, The New Serenity. The pavilion in the Giardini was pretty empty. We opened everything that could be opened, and there were a few QR codes on the wall. They led to all sorts of short films in which experts looked back and recounted how WE had arrived at this New Serenity and what their contribution had been. Sure, 2038 wasn’t paradise, but the major catastrophes had been averted. The best thing about it, was that many of the people got carried away as they talked and were really happy that we had just made it. In the future. Method acting. Oh yes, and there was a virtual basement that you could access from anywhere in the world and meet avatars from somewhere else.
And besides that: sailing, fishing, boccia, and protest…

...against the appointment of the very young, very blonde conductor Beatrice Venezi (beautiful name!) as director here at La Fenice. They say this did not happen because she was suitable for the position, but because of political pressure. She is a friend of Giorgia Meloni. And a friend of the Fratelli d’Italia. The premiere of Wozzeck is canceled. The orchestra writes letters. People cancel their subscriptions, an online petition has 10,000 signatures. On Friday, a free concert by Felice employees took place on Campo Sant’Angelo. Right-wing politicians and the mayor: “Unfair, ungrateful criticism!”

Pasolini admired Gramsci. ‘Gramsci’s Ashes’ is a rather melancholic poem by him. But Pasolini also made in 1966, the wonderful and funny film Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows), in which a talking raven points out to two wanderers that there is hunger in the world. And he tells them about Francis of Assisi and his good deeds. The raven follows them and refuses to understand that they do not want to be lectured or converted. Eventually, they twist his neck and eat him. With this in mind, have a great week, ciao! A presto.

Here we go, Number 26 :

Isolario, 118

Buongiorno! Today we’re going to take a look at the myriad islands here in the lagoon. They say there are 118. However, the larger ones are divided by canals into smaller sub-islands, which are also counted. Some of them are natural, but most are man-made.

The island of Torcello is located more than 11 kilometers north of the center and 150 meters north of the islands of Burano and Mazzorbo. It is 44.17 hectares in size and only two meters high. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was one of the first islands to be inhabited by refugees. In 452, Attila the Hun destroyed Altinum–at the time the most important city in Veneto–and most settlements in the area. Since the Gothic War, all of it formally belonged to the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, which back then was still a lagoon south of Venice. However, the Veneto mainland remained unsafe due to constant Gothic invasions from the north (see the map above: Venetia 600 AD). In the following 200 years, also Lombards and Franks came to Torcello and in 638, the Bishop of Altino himself followed. It was actually assumed that the island was first settled during this period, but then the floor of a Roman villa was found two meters below the water level. Today, Torcello is believed to date back to the 1st century. The island benefited from its close ties to Constantinople. But as a remote outpost of the Eastern Roman Empire, it retained de facto autonomy. And became a center of politics and trade.

In the 10th century, Torcello probably had between 10,000 and 35,000 inhabitants and was much larger than Venice. Several monasteries and churches were built, of which only Sant’Andrea and Santa Maria Assunta remain today. The latter is definitely worth seeing. A basilica filled with Byzantine mosaics, surrounded by reeds and silence. Actually, both are worth seeing. Like future ruins in the present. A Venice after Venice.

They were above the complex of church buildings, and it was dark; Carlo slowly led the two Japanese back into the Piazza and swam down. The ground was silted, and Carlo was careful not to step on it. His charges saw the great stone chair in the center of the Piazza (it had been called the Throne of Attila, Carlo remembered from one of his moldy books, and no one had known why), and waving to each other they swam to it. One of them made ludicrous attempts to stand on the bottom and walk around in his fins; he threw up clouds of silt. The other joined him. They each sat in the stone chair, columns of bubbles rising from them, and snapped pictures of each other with their underwater cameras. The silt would ruin the shots, Carlo thought.

Kim Stanley Robinson, ‘Venice Drowned’, 1981

Between 1348 and 1631, more than 100,000 people died in the Republic of Venice after several outbreaks of the plague. Meanwhile parts of Torcello sank and it turned into swampland. In the 14th century, ships could no longer navigate the Laguna Morta (the dead lagoon). The people who lived through the first plague got sick with malaria. The survivors grabbed what they could and fled to other islands further south. Murano for example. In 1797, Torcello had only 300 inhabitants. Today there are about 10.

Santa Maria Assunta has evidently been built by men in flight and distress, who sought in the hurried erection of their island church such a shelter for their earnest and sorrowful worship as, on the one hand, could not attract the eyes of their enemies by its splendor, and yet, on the other, might not awaken too bitter feelings by its contrast with the churches which they had seen destroyed.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1851 - 1853

Churches were generally the earliest permanent buildings in the lagoon. First, areas were drained and shipping channels dug, and then the houses of worship were laboriously erected. The earliest map shows the city crisscrossed by relatively large canals. And there are about 90 churches marked on it! Most of them still stand in the same place today.
Until the Middle Ages, parishes were like small feudal estates. There were no roads and no bridges. Wealthy families ruled over individual islands. They fought over the important office of doge. Then, in the 12th century, the doge was merely first among equals. And the islands lost their autonomy. They joined forces. At the same time, trade demanded faster transport routes. Islands were connected by land reclamation, canals and fish ponds were filled in, and bridges were built.
There is a very beautiful book by Sophia Psarra from 2018, ‘The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination’, in which the city is literally dissected. First into City-craft, then Statecraft, Story-craft, and Crafting architectural space. These are the main divisions. From the first one, Assembling the City, we learned the following:
In the archipelago of churches and squares (campi) the connections follow the simplest route. The one that is used most frequently. On water or on land. In network theory, this is called ‘betweenness centrality’ and in space syntax theory ‘choice’. The squares are located on one or more canals. And there is a church and a well (vera da pozzi) in the square. And that’s why you constantly get lost. In the dark, when GPS fails in the narrow alleys. “Was that the same fountain?” Space syntax theory. There are stairs, loading ramps, bridges, stairs, squares, bell towers, more bridges, churches, and even more stairs. All over. “There’s a canal back there!” Betweenness centrality. “A church!” “We passed that already half an hour ago!”
At the beginning of the 15th century, Venice had almost reached its present form. With nearly 70 parishes, each with its own church. And its own square. All built on swampland. All somehow similar.
In Venice east and west crossed paths. It became the most important trading center. Cotton, sugar, silk, carpets, perfumes, fruits, rubber, spices. The port was overlooking the lagoon. Ships came from the Adriatic Sea or sailed into it. And there was also a network of small ports and moorings in the city. Palaces, warehouses, and markets. Richly laden boats. Everywhere there was wealth.

When Benedetto Bordone was born in Padua, the city belonged to the Republic of Venice. It is not entirely clear when he was born, only that he married in 1480, died in 1531, and published his most important work in 1528: Isolario (The Book of Islands). It is a very nice cartographic book with all the islands of the known world. For sailors’ entertainment and guide. Folklore, history, myths, cultures, climate zones, and location. And the latest transatlantic discoveries were taken into account. It was, so to speak, up to date.
The exact date and place of Marco Polo’s birth are also unknown. Approximately 1254 in the Republic of Venice. In 1271, he set off with his father and uncle on a trade journey overland to Asia on the Silk Road. They stayed in China for 17 years. At that time, the Mongol Yuan Dynasty stretched from China to what is now Iraq, Korea, and as far north as Russia. The absolute ruler was Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan. The Kublai met the Polos and was so impressed by Marco’s intelligence and modesty that he appointed him foreign envoy. This took Marco to what is now Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, as well as to all corners of China. In 1295, the Polos returned after a 24-year journey (!!!!). At that time, Venice was at war with Genoa. Marco joined the war effort and was captured by the Genoans. His cellmate was Rustichello da Pisa, a romance writer. He convinced Marco Polo to dictate him the stories of his travels. And as a good writer incorporated some tales of his own. And some anecdotes and current affairs from China. The book was a hit. The Travels. The Italian title was Il Milione deriving from Polo’s nickname. For Europeans it was the first comprehensive look to the Far East. China, India, and Japan. Although Polo never visited Japan, he does mention it and you immediately get why he had the nickname Il Milione: “The people of the island of Cipangu possess enormous quantities of gold. The king’s palace is covered with pure gold, and its floors are paved with gold two fingers thick.” The last image in the gallery above is Benedetto Bordone’s interpretation of Marco Polo’s Japan.
Italo Calvino’s masterpiece Invisible Cities consists of 55 descriptions of cities and 18 dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Polo satisfies the emperor’s hunger for knowledge with mimes, plays, and dialogues that form the framework. At the beginning and end of each chapter. Which brings to mind ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’ Cities are invented and built as fantastic constructions but often say something about Venice.
And in Sophia Psarra’s The Venice Variations, everything boils down to Story-craft. Namely, “The imagination as combinatorial machine in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities” and “Crafting Architectural Space: Namely Le Corbusier’s (never built but planned for years) Venice Hospital and the three paradigms.” And finally, as the highlight of the Venice Variations, their conjunction:
Le Corbusier’s Invisible City, so to speak.
Marco Polo was released from prison in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in 1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo.

A brief interlude to the Uruguayan pavilion in the Giardini. It is often very, very good. Mostly poetic. At the last or second-to-last Biennale, there was a tree opera. Sounds awful, but it was great. And this time, you feel like you’re on an island. Or on a boat. There’s water all around. And it drips from the ceiling onto stones and into buckets. And the sound is great. Very beautiful.

’The Age of Islands’ is another wonderful book. By Alastair Bonnett, a professor of social geography in Newcastle. He has written a bestseller called ‘The Strangest Places in the World.’ He simply seems to love traveling. To strange places. And he describes these very beautifully. The island book is, on the one hand, about islands that are disappearing,–because sea levels are rising, or because they are sinking–and, on the other hand, about those that are emerging. That are being built. For the rich, from garbage, from volcanoes. By chance. Here about Phoenix Island, in China’s Hainan province in the South China Sea.

The new islands create lots of opportunities to build high-value, waterfront houses and leisure resorts. Reclaimed between 2002 and 2003, Phoenix Island opened in 2015. One of its key assets is a cruise ship terminal, offering a city-centre berth for the increasing numbers of Chinese who favour a holiday at sea. Before nightfall, I try to find out what else brings people here. There are a succession of very popular swimming pools, long tables decked out ready for an open-air barbecue, and a lot of expensive sports cars revving noisily. It doesn’t take me long before I think I’ve seen everything. The island is set up for families and romantic getaways; the air is warm and full of contented laughter. There is plenty to enjoy here, just not for me. People look puzzled as they catch sight of me – a lone male and the only Western person, it seems, on the island. I try to look purposeful, walking quickly, pretending that I have someone to meet; I stare at the blank screen of my phone, hiding.

Alastair Bonnett, The Age of Islands, 2021

Bonnett writes a chapter about the Chek Lap Kok airport island in Hong Kong on more than ten pages without mentioning the architect. Hahaha. But he also writes about Utopia. The island of the future, described by Thomas More in 1516. This is the text which combines all the books mentioned here. The Venice Variations, KSR, the Invisible Cities, the Age of Islands. All of them are about a possible (better) future.

Utopia had to be an island. (Thomas) More tells us that the founder of this uniquely perfect realm, King Utopus, ‘made it into an island’. Originally it was part of the mainland but Utopus ‘ordered a deep channel to be dug’ in order to ‘bring the sea quite round’. Only in this way could a flawless and completely new place be born. Utopia is a space apart, a jewel in the sea, a distant sight towards which one longs to steer.

The Age of Islands, Alastair Bonnett, 2021

Utopia is not far from the shore, as you can see from the image at the top. It is actually easy to reach. Happy week! Ciao ragazzi, a presto.

Here we go, Number 25 :

Lucca, Lee & Luffy

It has gotten colder here as well. Everyone has seamlessly switched from T-shirts and shorts to down jackets and hats. But sunglasses. The beach huts on the Lido have closed and the tourists have gotten older. And more German and Austrians. And Chinese everywhere, it’s their National Holiday. The Italians, Americans, and French have left once again. The Gaza protesters–Blocchiamo tutto–who are bringing Italian cities to a standstill are receiving a surprising amount of support from the population. Somehow, it also seems to be an anti-Meloni, anti-anti-future, anti-anti-ecology, anti-business-as-usual protest. Only the newspapers and TV stations are raging.
Lucca, the newspaper vendor, no longer sells newspapers. Only cigarettes and ice cream. A few stationery items and lots of plastic toys. Nobody reads newspapers anymore, says Lucca. That’s probably why he opened an insurance agency a few months ago. He is retraining. You always need insurance, says Lucca. And lately, there’s been a warning in his eyes and voice. You probably learn that in training. Method acting. Lee Strasberg.

Young people are also taking to the streets in Nepal, in Peru, the Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Morocco. They often call themselves ‘Gen Z’ and are rebelling. In Morocco, for example, there are no jobs, no investment in education or health. And the country is corrupt. Just like everywhere else. And now Morocco is investing in the 2030 Soccer World Cup.

The Straw Hat Pirate flag is now everywhere. It comes from the Blue Planet, where the Japanese manga series One Piece is set. There, a World Government controls almost everything. An authoritarian intercontinental organization. With the navy as its military arm. Cipher Pol is the secret police. The main character is the pirate Monkey D. Luffy, who battles with his huge fleet the Navy, the Seven Warlords of the Sea and the most influential pirate captains, known as the Four Emperors. After the flag also appeared at Gaza demonstrations, a dispute broke out on social media about who could be the World Government or the Seven Warlords. Corruption or better anti-corruption is actually the common theme. The future that cannot be bought. Therefore, it is really only a matter of time before the pirate flags shows up here.

Since Frank Gotthardt (guide #20) bought the old hospital by the sea, the luxury real estate company with this very German name immediately opened a branch here. Now, word has it that Gotthardt has run out of money! Others say that the Greens, or the Movimento 5 Estelle, who are or were something like an eco-party, are preventing the construction. Still others say that the Greens are just a pretext, a scapegoat, and that Gotthardt lacks the desire and/or money and would rather continue to support ultra-right haters in Germany and Austria. Or that he simply wants to build vacation apartments on the site of the old hospital. Another investor tried this before in the garden of the Hotel Des Bains and had to stop. And went bankrupt, people say. That’s pretty much the last thing we need here. More luxury real estate. More people who are here for four weeks a year. More squid rings, more chubby spritz drinkers. No ordinary person can afford an apartment here. Most of the people who work here live on the mainland.

There is a pretty good project at the Biennale that definitely deserves support. It’s called House Europe and it’s a petition to introduce a law in the European Parliament. Regardless of what you think of the people proposing it, regardless of whether you find it too bold or too loud, or not bold or loud enough, it’s good! They propose that taxes on building renovations be significantly reduced because there is a disproportion between demolition and new construction versus renovation. Demolition and new construction are usually much more lucrative because more money is invested. The standards are clear, and more money can be made. Renovating is much more difficult. The laws are complex, and there is less glory associated with it. But demolition creates dirt, pollutes the environment, releases CO2, and new construction is bad for the environment anyway. Very bad. In the end, the community always pays (now or in the future), and only a handful of people profit. House Europe is against speculation. It’s good! So, if you are European, please be sure to sign. Here!

Alarm! In addition to the demonstrations, the chikungunya virus is also a topic of concern here. It has now been detected a few times in Italy. In Tuscany and here in Veneto! 364 cases already this year. It causes fever and severe pain, but is only transmitted by infected mosquitoes. This means that the insect must have ingested the blood of an infected organism. The tiger mosquito also transmits yellow fever, the Zika virus, and dengue fever. If infected. The first known chikungunya epidemic was detected in Tanzania in 1952. But there are now cases in over 60 countries. The name ‘chikungunya’ comes from the language of the Makonde, a great Bantu people in southeastern Tanzania and Mozambique. Translated, it means ‘those who bent over,’ referring to the symptoms. However, preventing the disease primarily involves avoiding or minimizing mosquito bites. This brings us to the next great project, which was presented at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and also has to do with Tanzania. The Star Homes. Houses or architecture that prevents malaria:

It’s a project by our friends Lorenz von Seidlein, a virologist who lives in Bangkok and works as a research professor at Oxford and architect Jakob B. Knudsen, dean of the Royal Academy School of Architecture in Copenhagen. Salum Mshamu, who runs an NGO in Dar es Salaam. Architects Hannah Wood and Otis Sloan Brittain. And scientists and researchers from various disciplines. The goal was to build a specific type of house. A house that is slightly elevated, based on the Asian model, as mosquitoes always stay low, just above the ground, for their own protection. But also a well-ventilated house with large openings and doors that can be closed. And with nets in front of the windows and doors. This type of house was built 110 times in 60 different villages in Tanzania. And then compared with 400 conventional houses over a period of four years. And the results are good. Very good! Maybe we’ll need the houses here soon.

So there are lots of good things. We need more of them! More, more, more. We’ll hang in there! Happy start to the week! Ciao fioi, a presto.

Here we go, Number 23 :

etc…

Yesterday, we turned to ChatGPT to find out what lists actually are. Here’s what it said: “Lists are deceptively simple, but they’re powerful tools for structuring thought, memory and action.” Summarised in a list:
1. Organizing the world:
a.) Breaking down complexity, e.g. to-do lists, grocery lists.
b.) Making comparisons or categories clearer e.g. pros and cons, features of a design.
c.) Prioritizing and sequencing tasks or ideas.
2. Thinking and remembering:
a.) Offloading memory so it’s out of your head.
b.) Clarifying what matters, write it down and you see what’s essential.
c.) Supporting creative thinking e.g. brainstorm lists.
3. Communicating and persuading:
a.) Information becomes easy to scan and digest
b.) Making arguments more structured and convincing “three reasons why…”.
c.) Creating rhythm and rhetorical emphasis (lists in literature, speeches, manifestos).

(Because we received some of feedback, a note about the caption above. The Eco quote comes from this interview from November 2009. We do not wish to downplay pedophilia in any way. And as far as we understand it, and as we understand Umberto Eco, he deliberately included it in his list, detaching it from the “etcetera,” so to speak. As a demarcation, a wake-up call, and full of disgust. The connection between soccer and pedophilia could refer to Berlusconi, who was the owner of AC Milan and was charged in 2010 for the Bunga Bunga parties.)

A nice list about lists, isn’t it? And then this morning, ChatGPT woke us up with the question: “Do you want me to sketch how Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists” (a wonderful book from 2009, originally La Vertigine della Lista, i.e. The Vertigo of the List) “connects to Jacques Derrida’s etc.-function you asked about earlier?” ‘Earlier’ here means a few days or weeks ago. And although we didn’t ask about Derrida’s etc. function, but rather Umberto Eco’s etc. function, because we could remember his term but not where we got it from. We answered YES.

This naturally resulted in a new list. Point 2.) is about Umberto Eco’s book: Lists are a way to “touch infinity.” We use lists to point out things that are beyond their understanding. Love, the universe, God, beauty. Then we list the parts or characteristics and the list becomes a substitute for the infinite. Point 3.) is then a list of lists or list makers: Homer’s epic catalogues. Medieval relic lists. Renaissance collections and cabinets of curiosity. Baroque enumerations. Modern and postmodern writers like James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, who delight in endless inventories.
Then Jacques Derrida comes into play, with the (now shared) etc.-function. It is, so to speak, the answer to a question we never asked: “etc. is a marker of incompleteness and deferral. Writing etc. acknowledges that the list could go on, that language can’t exhaust the field. It’s an opening, not a closure.” etc.
Then it became increasingly confusing, and we told ChatGPT that we hadn’t asked about Derrida’s etc. function but about the concept of hospitality that appeared in his book Adieu, his obituary for Emanuel Lévinas. And ChatGPT wrote a new list in less than a second: “Great — let’s bring them together around hospitality:…” Eco’s Infinite List would be an invitation to excess. When Homer lists ships or François Rabelais lists types of cheese, they open a door. The reader is invited to imagine the rest. Derrida treats etc. as unconditional hospitality in language. “I haven’t closed the door; something else can still come.” A placeholder for the unforeseen. The stranger who has not yet appeared. Eco and Derrida would meet in hospitality: the ethical horizon—the willingness to let in what has not yet been written, not yet seen, not yet arrived. And then it comes, the unexpected: Point 4c.) “VENICE’s urban texture — repeating bridges, campi, façades — is itself list-like, extending beyond what one can see, holding space for arrivals.” Venice is a list!
ChatGPT, already completely on a high, sent out a poetic manifesto: ”… The true list is never about possession. It is about making room. Lists as Hospitality.”

There are lists you don’t want to be on because you’ll get fired, deported, or even killed. And then there are good lists. The ones that save lives. Like Oskar Schindler’s list. There are clear list artists like Hanne Darboven, Jenny Holzer, On Kawara, and basically Sophie Calle, who we’ve mentioned a bunch of times. Wikipedia answers with lists. ChatGPT does too, of course. Umberto Eco called it the poetics of the etcetera not etc.function as we thought. That’s why we didn’t find it, but we learned quite a lot along the way. And we found the term again in the foreword to The Infinity of Lists.

We also made lists for last week’s Unlikely Dinner. Ingredients, tableware, wine lists, and last but not least, guest lists. Those were easy: there were about 35 of Deane Simpson’s students coming from Copenhagen from the Royal Academy. Plus a few other teachers. 25 Hong Kong students of John Lin (Chef), plus teachers, about 10 guests from the Vatican and a few from Tatiana Bilbao. And 20 of us. Mainly locals. A great mix!

The students from Hong Kong had difficulty getting to Venice because there was a general strike throughout Italy on Monday. Around half a million people took to the streets. Under the slogan Blocchiamo tutto (Let’s block everything), there were protests in at least 75 municipalities. With schools closed, trains disrupted, roads and ports blocked. In Rome, 100,000 people occupied the main station before marching through the streets. The strike was called by several grassroots unions demanding that the government end economic and military cooperation with Israel. Once again, it was the dockworkers in Genoa, one of Europe’s most important ports, who took the lead. They did so in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla, the civilian convoy that set sail last month to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The ships were attacked by drones, prompting Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to respond by dispatching warships. After all, there are Italians on board, including politicians. However, Meloni described the whole thing as “dangerous, and irresponsible.” The activists should hand over their cargo in Cyprus.

The mobilization in Genoa in July and August exceeded all expectations. The organizers called on the city to donate 40 tons of food, which was to be distributed among four ships. They received 300 tons. And 40,000 people, in a city with a population of 560,000, joined the march. It was the largest demonstration since the 2001 G8 summit. In Piazza De Ferrari, Mayor Silvia Salis spoke about the history of anti-fascist resistance. A representative of the Roman Curia said Genoa had shown that it believes “another world is possible.”
Since October 2023, dockworkers have been mobilizing against the war in Gaza. They are responding to a call from Palestinian trade unions to block arms shipments to Israel. In cooperation with French dockworkers, shipments to Saudi Arabia were also blocked because the cargo was destined for the war in Yemen. After this was finally delivered via Venice, the workers established an anti-war network across Europe to track and disrupt global arms trade. The dockworkers of Genoa can look back on a long list of international solidarity. In 1973, they sent a ship with food to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It’s something the city is still proud of today. They also blocked cargo ships supplying Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile and boycotted the apartheid regime in South Africa.

We originally asked ChatGPT for lists because we want to create some ourselves. Finally. A real travel guide! A list of the best restaurants between the Arsenale and the Giardini. The best exhibitions, the most famous living Venetians (spoiler: Terence Hill). The best pavilions in the Giardini, the most beautiful islands, the most important myths, etc. We publish them here on Substack and later on Instagram.

A kind of proto–Eco etcetera is this beautiful list by Jorge Luis Borges:

Animals are divided into:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

From a Chinese encyclopedia called The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in Jorge Luis Borges’ essay The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, 1942.

Enumeration is provisional and open-ended. Every taxonomy, every list, is historically and culturally contingent. This issue of the Unlikely Guide should have been number 22. Some of us already wanted to call the last issue #23. Because of A and B. Or just because. Because in a world where so little is true or right anymore,… etc. In any case, we’ll see you soon with issue 25. Next week already! And before that on Substack and Instagram with lists, lists, lists...
Ciao ragazzi! A presto.

Here we go, Number 21 :

PESCE

There has been some pretty good news about fish lately. On the one hand, a few new species have just been discovered. Careproctus colliculi, the bumpy snailfish, is pink, has 22 pectoral fins and eight caudal fins, a round head and large eyes, which is why some people call it the deep-sea Pokémon. It looks pretty cute and is the new star of the eastern Pacific. It also has extremely well-developed pterygiophorae, which form a large suction disc. A bumpy snailfish filmed at a depth of 3,263 meters in Monterey Bay, California, and a dark snailfish:

Then there is Careproctus yanceyi. The dark snailfish has a smaller ventral suction disc, single irregular nostrils, a round head with a horizontal mouth, six gill rays, and a completely black body. And Paraliparis em. The sleek snailfish has no suction disc at all, a long, black body that is compressed at the sides, and a strikingly angled jaw. And take note: it has a front-facing anus. There are over 400 species of snailfish worldwide, some of which live at considerable depths.

There is also good news from the Mediterranean: researchers at the Max Planck Institute have discovered that fish recognise humans. Many animals can do this in captivity. But what about in the wild? Underwater? They came up with this idea when fish repeatedly stole food from divers that was actually intended for other experiments.

The fish recognised the researchers who normally carried the food. The scientists discovered that fish can distinguish between visual characteristics (operant conditioning paradigm), but conversely, humans were also able to differentiate. Katinka Soller explains in the video:"… that one looks a bit different behind the head or another one that had a cut in the tail. After some time you just look at the fish quite often and you realize that they all look different."

Federico Riccato was born and lives in Mestre, northern mainland Venice, a large polluted port and industrial area. But Mestre also has something very very beautiful about it. A touch of Milan, faded wealth and urbanity. Frederico has a doctorate in environmental sciences from the University of Venice. He is co-founder of Laguna Project s.n.c., a company with in-depth expertise in environmental monitoring of the ecosystems of the northern Adriatic Sea and the Venice Lagoon. With a focus on fish communities and fisheries. And recently, they have also been involved in European projects on the protection of green and blue infrastructure: Poseidon.

Federico Riccato is part of Metagoon and was involved in the science fiction workshop we keep coming back to. If Metagoon's cake-like website were a dartboard, where each point on the circular map tells a story, Federico would be a bull's-eye. Slightly to the left of center, a little bit of everything, but just a little further to the left, at ‘fishing.’ In his contribution, he addresses the connection between fishermen and scientists. How and why they should work together on the dynamics within the lagoon system.

And Federico has a fish shop in Mestre called ‘Itticosostenibile’ that is committed to sustainable fish consumption. Origin of the fish, equipment used, and preparation. And he has just published his second novel: Sette sardine aperte a libro (Seven Sardines Open Like a Book) It's about a fishmonger. More precisely, it's about a fishmonger's day. From the moment he opens his eyes to the moment he closes them, “an incomplete circle that never seems to close.” The fish market in a Venetian suburb, people like in an aquarium, and his shop... “the unexpected essence of the thoughts and feelings of a man who only sells fish. To everyone.” Like his first novel, Spigola o agnello (Sea Bass or Lamb), the book is unfortunately only available in Italian. So far.

When we had the idea of organizing an event for lots of people with blue crabs, we naturally asked Federico. First of all, we asked him if he could get them for us, because the fishmongers we visited just turned up their noses. They wouldn't sell them. Why not, actually? Blue crabs are invasive in the lagoon and why not eat invasive species? According to a newspaper, the blue crabs even eat their own young because there is nothing else left. Federico disputes this. He also says that blue crabs are exported to China, where they are considered a delicacy.

Blue crabs are said to secrete a poison when killed (cows and pigs should do the same!). That's why it's recommended to gut them alive or boil them. Alive! There are a few vegetarians among us, so we asked Federico if there wasn't another way. A more gentle way. They have no idea that they are invasive here. And Federico gave us the surprising answer that you have to put them in the freezer, then they fall asleep and die. And even better, he's doing that for us! 10 kg for €80. And John Lin, the architect we featured in Issue # 18, will make dumplings out of them. Chinese ravioli. With mushrooms for the vegetarians.

And they're letting us do that Unlikely Dinner at the Holy See Pavilion!
Isn't that great? Tuesday. Tomorrow evening. It starts at 7 p.m. All kinds of people are coming. From Denmark, China, Venice, and even a few Germans. If you're in town, write to us. The pavilion is very well done this time. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier (who was also mentioned in Issue #3 on the Ocean Space Panel) and Giovanna Zabotti, vice-president of Fondaco Italia. Architects Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO from Mexico City and MAIO from Barcelona carried out the design and construction. ‘Opera Aperta’ received a special mention from the Biennale jury.

According to Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, ‘Opera Aperta’ is “a construction site, an ongoing process to which everyone is invited to contribute. Our desire is that this pavilion parable give concrete expression to the prophetic intuitions of the encyclical Laudato si' (Praise Be to You) in the field of architecture and become an active workshop of human and communal intelligence.” And in this 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis asked whether the time had come “to accept a certain recession in some parts of the world and provide aid so that a healthy recovery can take place in other parts.” There was great excitement. The Pope questions the constant call for even more growth. Because the world can no longer bear it. “Everything is connected”, wrote Pope Francis.

“Intellectuals – writers, scientists, sociologists, historians, economists – have embodied the quasi-religious belief in continuous progress. From the very beginning of the modern era, they subsumed themselves, much to Rousseau’s alarm, into what they saw as the larger force and movement – the onward march of history. The iconic modern intellectual is, aptly, Voltaire, who helped found civil society and fought for freedom of speech while counselling ruling classes and participating in international trade. But history seems to have come full circle instead of marching forward.

The most convincing and influential public intellectual today – Pope Francis – is not an agent of reason and progress. In a piquant irony, he is the moral voice of the Church that was the main adversary of Enlightenment intellectuals as they built the philosophical scaffolding of a universal commercial society. He has acquired his moral stature largely because the ostensibly autonomous and self-interested individual, unleashed by the advance of commercial society, confronts an impasse. The contemporary crisis stems in large part from the failed universalization of this figure, and its descent, in the age of globalization, into either angry tribalism or equally bellicose forms of antinomian individualism."

Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra, 2017

The pavilion is housed in the former Oratory of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello. Between the Giardini and the Arsenale. Maybe we'll see you there, otherwise we'll report back in issue# 22. Of course. About the dumplings or ravioli. And the people. Ciao ragazzi! A presto.

Here we go, Number 20 :

Ospedale al Mare

Near Stubenring in Vienna's city center, Austria's erstwhile turquoise political elite has rented an office: on the one hand, former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who had to resign twice before joining Peter Thiel in America and now maintains a huge corporate network. Former Agriculture Minister Elisabeth Köstinger, who was also Minister of Tourism and Sustainability under Kurz I and later on the supervisory board of Easyjet, haha. And then there is the person who is actually the main focus here: former Austrian Finance Minister Gernot Blümel. Blümel is in charge of the ‘Mare Project.’ This is to be a large research park with 900 scientists, located in the old hospital on the Lido. The Ospedale al Mare. A “place of international cooperation where the medicine of tomorrow will be researched and designed.” Presented at the 19th Architecture Biennale in the Tesa dell’Isolotto, Darsena Grande dell’Arsenale:

But before we get to Blümel and the hospital, let's talk a little bit about the smart networks behind it all. Because threads spin out in all directions from the office in downtown Vienna. For example, Ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz owns SK Management GmbH, which in turn has a stake in AS2K Beteiligungs GmbH, in which Alexander Schütz holds a 50 percent share. And Alexander Schütz has many more friends. For example, in 2016, Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, a buddy of former President Viktor Yanukovych, stayed with him while fighting extradition to the US on corruption charges. Or Christian Angermayer, another buddy of Schütz. They share a 52-meter yacht. Angermayer floated seven companies on the stock market during the pandemic and became a billionaire with medical start-ups and bitcoins. He is said to be a ‘symbol of our age’. Is that good or bad? But more importantly, Angermayer is a friend of CDU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn. CDU stands for ‘Christian Democratic Union of Germany’.

And during the pandemic, Jens Spahn—as German health minister—announced a large order totaling €400 million for highly questionable COVID drugs. From two pharmaceutical companies. And, as research by the excellent independent newsletter CORRECTIV shows, a company from Angermayer's fund portfolio was involved in the success of one of the companies. But the current German health minister, Nina Warken, a party colleague of Spahn's, does not want to reveal the details of the deal. Only that of the 190,000 doses purchased, only 1,560 were dispensed to patients. This is now hanging over Jens Spahn. Because he not only has that on his plate, but also questionable mask deals that turned out to be another billion-dollar fiasco. And then there are Angermayer's donations to Spahn's party, the CDU. Hundreds of thousands of euros.
Christian Angermayer is now into psychedelic mushrooms and brain implants. And with Donald Trump Jr., he's into ‘Enhanced Games.’ An Olympics on steroids where doping is explicitly allowed. Meanwhile, he became one of the richest men in the world. Christian is a big networker. His business partner Alexander Schütz has not always been so fortunate. He is or was well acquainted with Markus Braun, the long-time head of financial services provider Wirecard, which filed for bankruptcy in June 2020 after it became known that balance confirmations for trust accounts amounting to €1.9 billion had been falsified. Braun was arrested. COO Jan Marsalek is wanted on an international arrest warrant for commercial gang fraud, aggravated breach of trust, and other economic crimes. In addition, during his time at Wirecard, he was apparently an employee of Russian secret services.

Patience, patience, the circle will soon be complete! In any case, Alexander Schütz had advised Wirecard CEO Markus Braun, when the house was already burning brightly and the Financial Times had been reporting inconsistencies for years: “Destroy this newspaper.” As a result, Schütz lost his position on the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank.
Schütz is married to lawyer Eva Hieblinger-Schütz, who is the publisher and co-owner of the digital media outlet eXXpress. It's something like Nius in Germany. Both are ultra-right-wing. Nius is Julian Reichelt, a former editor-in-chief of Axel Springer’s powerful BILD newspaper, and somehow also a ‘fallen figure’. He intervenes in politics. For example, the law professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf was nominated by the German Social Democrats for the second senate of the Federal Constitutional Court. The CDU agreed to this. But when Nius launched a full-scale attack against her, labeling Brosius-Gersdorf a radical leftist because of her stance on abortion and human dignity, and even placing ads against her on Google, the CDU, represented by Jens Spahn, withdrew its support. Unique in German history. The Second Senate would possibly be responsible for reviewing a ban on the AfD, the ‘Alternative for Germany.’ A party close to Nius. Anti-migrant, against Europe, anti-American, largely racist, völkisch, predominantly pro-Putin and/or pro-China. Full of hatred and without hope.
And now here's the kicker: both portals, Nius and its Austrian version eXXpress, are financed by German entrepreneur Frank Gotthardt. And now Mr. Gotthardt has purchased the hospital grounds at the Lido and hired Gernot Blümel.
And how did he become really rich? That's right: with medical supplies. And when? Again, correct: during the pandemic. When Jens Spahn was health minister. Gotthardt had already made lots of money before that. But during the pandemic he had something of a monopoly on connectors, software solutions, and services for hospitals and medical practices. Germany was still reliant on fax machines. So CompuGroup's total assets doubled during that time. As CORRECTIV puts it, the “company network benefited greatly from health policy decisions.”

In 1868, it was decided in Venice to do something for the health of the poor. Thalasso and heliotherapy, which were particularly effective at the seaside. So on the Lido. Fundraising began in the royal gardens of St. Mark's, and in 1870, the first building of the ‘Ospizio Marino’ was erected for 450 children suffering from malnutrition, rickets, and tuberculosis. With the construction of the Des Bains and Excelsior hotels at the beginning of the 20th century, luxury tourism took off. This was not really compatible with poor children. Between 1921 and 1933, an enormous medical complex was built. Pediatrics, gynecology, cardiology, surgery, and in 1933 it was reestablished as the Ospedale al mare.

The king and Mussolini attended the re-opening. This is where the history of the hospital usually begins. Six years later, it was recognized as a ‘Category 1 Specialist Hospital.’

The Marinoni Theater was built in Art Nouveau style, as well as the small church of S. M. Nascente. Then, in the 1970s, came the decline. Social spending was cut, and the medical technology from the 1930s was outdated.

By 2001, the hospital had only 125 beds, and in 2002, it was closed. Supposedly, this was no problem, as a large regional hospital was built in Mestre. The complex was sold to EstCapital, which at times also owned the Des Bains and the Excelsior. And then things became unclear. In 2006, there was a plan to convert the complex into a hotel with a Palazzo del Cinema. In 2009, there was a bidding process for the entire complex. In 2010, the city bought back the property at a loss. For 27 million. EstCapital was later allegedly raided for tax evasion of over 20 million. In 2011, parts of the site were occupied. A short-lived citizens' initiative: Ricreatorio Marinoni. Then nothing. Then Gotthardt.

Back to Gernot Blümel. Do you remember the Ibiza video? (Blümel doesn't.) The whole world would have laughed about it if it hadn't been so serious. It featured the then right-wing FPÖ party leader and later Austrian vice-chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache. And he, drunk and under the influence of cocaine, uttered the legendary phrase: “Novomatic pays everyone.” It was about gambling licenses, power, and, of course, bribery. And in the casino affair, the public prosecutor's office investigated the suspicion that the former CEO of Novomatic, Harald Neumann, had approached Blümel about tax arrears in Italy so that the government would intervene. And Neumann may have offered illegal donations to the ÖVP party. That is why Blümel's apartment was searched in February 2021.
In the Ibiza investigation committee, Blümel said he believed he did not even have a laptop as a minister. (Haha!) And he replied more than 80 times that he couldn't remember. After four or five years! And, of course, lots of pictures of Blümel with a laptop appeared. During the house search, a laptop used by him and his wife was not found at first because his wife had taken it with her on a walk. Later, nothing suspicious was found on it.

As finance minister, Blümel also failed to comply with the Constitutional Court's obligation to provide information in the Ibiza affair. Instead, he printed out the requested information too late and delivered it in 204 file folders. The papers, which were classified as secret, could not be digitized or searched by keyword. Nor could they be quoted or copied in media-public meetings. For this, Blümel was awarded the 2021 Wall of Silence by the Freedom of Information Forum.

Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, is himself in serious trouble. Many of his employees are under investigation. Last year, Renato Boraso was arrested. The city councilor for mobility. It was about the Palazzo Papadopoli, right on the Grand Canal. It was sold in 2018 for €10.7 million to Ching Chiat Kwong from Singapore. The market price was €14 million. Boraso is said to have received €73,200 for the deal. And Mayor Brugnaro? In a recorded call he warned Boraso: "I'm telling you, be careful, you have to restrain yourself." But didn't he know that Boraso's phone was being tapped? And Brugnaro also did business with Ching Chiat Kwong. This involved a plot of land between the lagoon and Mestre, which he bought in 2006 for €5 million. It was heavily polluted by the chemical industry and Porto Marghera. Nevertheless, its value increased, especially since 2015, when Brugnaro was in office and the municipality passed a regulation on building land and sustainability. Brugnaro's staff negotiated a price of 150 million euros (!!). That's roughly the amount Frank Gotthardt wants to invest on the Lido. And the municipal council wanted to push for a ‘doubling of the approved building volume’ on the land between the lagoon and Mestre. Of course, Brugnaro claims to be innocent. They are all victims.

Benno Albrecht, rector of IUAV and curator of the Intelligent Venice exhibition, said: “Venice has been saved (by Mose), now we need a major civic project to save the Venetians. And this can only be done by creating jobs outside of tourism. High-level jobs with high added value.” And Gotthardt is a positive example for him. "These are the solutions for Venice's future,“ Albrecht emphasizes. Umberto Eco said: ”For all complex questions, there is a simple answer, and it's wrong."

So what kind of medicine is being researched there? Enhanced? For everyone? What does sustainability mean in this case? Like at the Biennale? Are these the people behind the solutions for all of us? Jens Spahn is actually a conservative Catholic politician from Ahaus in the Münsterland. But then he wants a lot of power and to play with the big boys. They all want to change the world. With artificial intelligence, spectacular innovations, and technically enhanced superhumans. Preferably thanks to companies in which they have a stake. Or companies whose owners donate to their parties. For freedom. For their freedom. Without rules. Without laws, without competition. Without empathy. For their eternal life. As saviors of a special species.

Ten years ago, Pope Francis published the excellent encyclical Laudato si’ (Praise Be to You). In it, the former Pope makes clear that we must understand that we are “all inhabitants of the same common home.” And he comes across as an advocate of degrowth. Pankaj Mishra subsequently called him “the most convincing and influential public intellectual today” in his 2017 book Age of Anger. Laudato si’ also inspired the Vatican's very impressive Holy See Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale. Its title: Opera Aperta. That, and the Pope's text, will be the subject of the next issue. Ciao ragazzi! A presto.

Here we go, Special Number B:

‘The ephemeral is eternal.’

Actually, this was really supposed to be issue #20, the second critical edition, and it was already half finished. It was to be called ‘Floating’ and briefly ask the question of whether everything that somehow drifts through the lagoon, or rather, everything that artists, architects, and activists imagine could/should/would float through the lagoon, is automatically somehow ‘good,’ or ‘poetic,’ or utopian. Or, to put it more pragmatically, ‘necessary.’ Of course, Aldo Rossi's contribution to the very first Architecture Biennale (and at the same time to the Theater Biennale) is unforgettable: a “once seen, forever remembered” form. A cube + a tower. The image of a wooden theater floating through the lagoon. A lighthouse. Archetype, memory, children's toy. Strictly geometric. Theater as collective memory. City as stage. It must have been amazing to stand on the terrace, 15 meters above the ground, looking out over the Dogana, St. Mark's Square, San Giorgio, and La Giudecca. Rossi's theater was anchored at the Punta della Dogana in November 1979, after being built in the shipyards of Fusina and towed here by a tugboat. The idea goes back to the floating theaters for carnival. Seasonal structures, ephemeral architecture. Pavilions, floating stages. City of spectacle. Type + place + memory. And so Rossi's spirit floats not only through the lagoon to this day, –we would have argued in #20–, but also through the corridors of most universities. Especially ETH Zurich. So Swiss. Archetypes (CG Jung) + Discipline.

And we would have written, because it would be the critical edition, that the curator of the current Biennale, Carlo Ratti, built this tub with Eric Höweler and J. Meejin Yoon, AquaPraça. Which will float (or already floats?) across the Atlantic to Belém, Brazil. To the environmental conference COP30. It is not clear whether this is meant symbolically, i.e., that only the idea floats across the Atlantic or the tub itself. "Spanning over 400 square meters (4,000 square feet), AquaPraça's design literally carves public space out of the sea, creating a physical dialogue between the built environment and natural forces. The submersible structure floats using principles of equilibrium, displacement, and buoyancy." In the completely bloated texts, the project refers directly to Aldo Rossi. Past vs. future. No recent images. No memory. But Casa Vogue likes it.

In 1980, Aldo Rossi was criticised by the great, Venice based, historian and critic Manfredo Tafuri in Domus:

“Not by chance the Theatrum Mundi is connected to the ars memoriae. Its dramatic contribution to Venice is the marriage of Utopia – the globality of the experience promised by a central space – to the phenomenal, the relative, the transient, embodied by the provisional character of the stage “machine”. (…) Memory here is in direct communication with the myth of Venice’s “freedom”: the absolute is mirrored in a dissolving of limits; the substance does not come into conflict with the appearance.
This is not the memory to which Rossi’s ‘theatre’ refers. On the contrary, the theatre does not seem to contain any allusions to the fluidity of Venetian scenic space, nor does its structure enter into any consonance with the web of kinetic paths that give concreteness to the continuity between the urban lagoon setting and the late-Roman Kunstwollen.

Manfredo Tafuri, 1980, L’éphémère est éternel. Aldo Rossi in Venice, Domus 605

It’s a really really good text about Venice. And about Aldo Rossi: “The analogue about which Aldo Rossi talks to us this time is inscribed within the problem of vision itself. His ‘lighthouse’ gives out too strong a light compared to the multiple and to the metamorphic with which the urban space of the Serenissima is imbued; its evidence ruthlessly tears the masks which time – denied by the suspended tonality of the ‘theatre’ – has glued to the faces.” The guy knew how to write. And think.

The first Biennale is, of course, remembered as the postmodern Biennale, and Teatro del Mondo became an icon of the postmodern turn – but Rossi's version of postmodernism differed from that of Robert Venturi or Michael Graves. It was not a playful pastiche, but rather serious archetypes and collective memory.

Charles Jencks wrote in Domus: "A preference for historicism overcame a preference for communication in general. Characteristically the term was co-opted into the subtitle of the exhibition to serve a partly sectarian polemic. Should one object?"
Our favourite was Luigi Snozzi anyway, who was almost the same age as Rossi and an admirer of his too. Snozzi adapted. He reacted. He was flexible. His projects often reveal 'detours', offering unexpected views or slightly off-kilter perspectives, letting nature and context guide the design rather than strict typology. While Rossi was monumental, neo-Rationalist and introverted, Snozzi was nonchalant, open and lively. Snozzi's long-term living laboratory was Monte Carasso, a small village near Bellinzona. He was the building director there from 1979 until the 1990s. He applied only 10 rules for an entire community, ensuring that new housing respected street alignments, parcel typologies and collective space. However, the last rule can override the first nine. A sense of identity was re-established against suburban sprawl.

Originally, our floating text wasn't meant to start off critically. Instead, it was supposed to begin with the Floating Cinema, which has become with its 6th edition something of an institution here. Founded by Edoardo Aruta and Paolo Rosso and curated together with Alessandra Messali. It is literally a raft with a screen. And you are taken to the raft in large gondola-like boats. Or you come with your boat. It is truly beautiful. The atmosphere, the water, the sunset over Mestre. And on land, the magnificent Marco Bravetti cooks with TOCIA! Cucina e Comunità, whom we already celebrated in issue #5, The Sauce as Manifesto. But since #20 was supposed to be the critical issue, we would also have written that the programming could sometimes be improved a little. For example, we were there when our friend Stanley Schtinter gave a live presentation of beautiful observations about mermaids behind the Iron Curtain. 'Sirens, Sex and Censorship'. So he really spoke with a microphone in his hand. The only problem was that there were already two spoken contributions beforehand. Why aren't there films interspersed? And why do the films get longer towards the end? Speaking of drama and rhythm. But the floating cinema is great.
So that's roughly what issue #20 should have looked like. But THEN! After watching between 24 and 32 films and debating at length who would win, --clearly ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ was high in the running and went on to win the Jury Prize. The second most important. A really touching true story of a girl from Gaza City. And the great tree film by Ildikó Enyedi, ‘Silent Friend’, also won something. It would fit in well with the Architecture Biennale, because the story of the tree is treated more conscientiously than that of the people. Xin Zhilei, Gianfranco Rosi, Toni Servillo, all good decisions. The director's prize for Bennie Safdie and the ‘The Smashing Machine’, however, we can't understand at all. Mixed-Martial-Arts. Strong people who don't look great and brutally beat each other over the head. In between, they make banana milkshakes with steroids. Somehow 1990s TV in movie terms. Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. Not such good acting. Only for absolute MMA fans. But and here's why we're not just writing issue # 20, but instead are posting movie reviews here again: the Golden Lion.

Why not just give the Golden Lion to the best movie? And we all agreed on that. It was Kathryn Bigelow's ‘A House of Dynamite’? Told from multiple perspectives, it's about a surprise nuclear attack on the US. BANG! It's also about the current political situation in the world. Insanely well done. Didn't they get anything because it's a Netflix production? Then why invite them at all? Why isn't Gus Van Sant's ‘Dead Man's Wire’ in competition? It's about a man who fights back against a rent and loan shark (although it's historical, it's present day!) by kidnapping his son. Al Pacino plays the bad guy, and the movie draws heavily on ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ from 1975, in which Pacino plays the hostage-taker. Pacino can also be seen in the only truly good scene in Julian Schnabel's Dante film. ‘The Hand of Dante’ was out of competition and got the ‘Cartier Prize’. Haha. Incidentally, Olivier Assayas would also have deserved the Lion. And Jude Law as Putin. And Mona Fastvold for ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’!! But Jim Jarmush for this movie? It's three parts that have nothing to do with each other, except that it's about family, time (Rolex watches) and water. Life? That says all the good things. In the first part with Tom Waits and Adam Driver, you still think it could go somewhere. The second part with Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchet and Charlotte Rampling is implausible, boring and annoying. Wealthy people who lie to each other. Or not? And the third part is nostalgically kitschy and superfluous. Was that a deal beforehand? Was that also a deal with Pedro Almodóvar last year? There, too, a completely irrelevant film about elite New Yorkers who go to die in a nice house and the main thing seems to be that the colors of the sweaters match the couch. Trump is so successful because of people like that. Period.
In 1980, the same year as the first Architecture Biennale, Jarmush made his first film (on 16mm) with the beautiful title ‘Permanent Vacation’. As director, producer, editor and partly composer. A lyrical portrait of Manhattan in which the homeless 16-year-old Allie, who grew up in reformatories and juvenile detention centers, floats through the empty and broken Lower East Side. The collective memory is volatile, jumbled. Allie is more interested in the late 1940s. There is little future. The budget was US$ 12,000.

And then at the very end of the festival ‘Chien 51’ by Cédric Jimenez was screened. Out of competition. Hm? It’s based on the dystopian novel by Laurent Gaudé, which was a nice surprise given that this guide is also about science fiction. Paris 2045. The City is divided into 3 zones. According to wealth and safety. And you can only get out of zone 3 by winning the TV game Destiny as a child. That's what Salia, played by the wonderful Adèle Exarchopoulos, has managed to do. She is a cop in Zone 2 and everything is controlled by ALMA, an AI whose ingenious programmer is killed right at the beginning. Incredibly exciting. Great chases through Paris! Drones everywhere, total surveillance, high-security borders. The movie is probably the most topical of all. In view of the current events in Paris! The solutionists in architecture should check it out.
Phew, the real issue #20 is coming soon. And then about something completely different. There's enough to rant about! Ciao fioi, a presto.