CROATIA-VENICE-AMSTERDAM... PART FIVE: VENEZIA...

Our room has rich silk brocade on the walls in a stylishly remodeled building where Stephen had stayed a decade ago. It is smaller than expected... not the same upper room he thought he had reserved. But we have all of Venice... probably our favorite city... just below the window facing the facade of the church. On the hotel's top floor is a sitting area offering chilled prosecco adjacent to a roof-top terrace overlooking Saint Stephen's Square.We spent several sunsets & late evening finishes there, sometimes with other guests.

 
The window just below the small railing was our bathroom...

Walking to the Vaparretto (water bus) stop we remembered adventures we had had
inside the central smaller arched window... on a previous visit.

I enjoyed this view on our way down the stairway to the street.

Wrought iron grills always seem more romantic in Venice... 

MY EYES & ART!

This piece spoke to me... I was awaiting having my cataracts fixed upon my return home...

We are here to swim in the vast visual sea of an art event known as the Biennale... having been held for a season of months every second [odd] year for more than a century... since 1895.

While the whole city becomes involved, with scattered national, private & corporate galleries... often requiring treks up numerous stairs into the upper floors of ancient palazzi...

 Yet, one provocative example reached out of the canal waters...

There are two main venues:
The Giardini is a more formal park with a collection of permanent national pavilions, sometimes brashly fresh but often if not rather stiflingly antique, seeming rather tired. 
The Arsenale... is an even more antique form,
while being an infinitely more aesthetic & functional space for exposition.

The Arsenale itself became fascinating to me... often eclipsing the art it housed.  Part of Venice's historic naval base, this hugely long building was a ship-building facility of extraordinary capabilities. A ship in a day! The present building is simply handsome in rather a more Renaissance manner than its incredible description as being Medieval.

The vast spaces where Venezia built her ships now offer fabulous venues for my imagination… not to mention that it offers the same for curating such a plethora of rich contemporary creativity. The long colonnade, with various patterns of brickwork exposed through broken stucco, supports an immense beamed roof.

The center wooden floor no doubt overlays the mechanique & iron tracking on which the vessels being built were moved along between numerous transepts housing workshop bays specific to that particular stage of production, many having additional tracks from exterior delivery ports supplying material for the various crafts.

All this puts a beautiful lie to any notion that the assembly line was invented by Henry Ford!

These hundred brick plinths became sentinels & sentries,
characters gracefully holding raw space for a cultural dance...

Ample space encourages gardens of visual ideas inside conceptual forests.

Fibers are integral to outfitting ships with essential need for sails & cordage... used here to make an airy tent form inviting meditation & play.

Suddenly fiber becomes bales of color!

Shipping becomes metaphorical & dreamlike...

Boxes of mirrors precisely reflect unexpected presumptions...

Stories require imagination...

 

Visual technology abounds...

 ...while also presenting the eerie experience of climbing up into space
holding a mirror of shallow suspended water reflecting the rafters...
inviting reverie... perhaps on sea-rise.

 An unexpected dessert of Chinese intricacy in several media followed an exuberant introduction of laser-cut sheet-metal [brass or anodized aluminum?] 

A later ton of not-dissimilar paper-cuts...

Making a wall...

 Embroidery was abundantly featured as a third medium.
Not at all "forbidden stitch"...  but a lusciously long impasto of stroke-able silk...

Ireland presented an arresting video atmosphere presided over by a gorgeous crone...

Bones of Lucy do indeed bridge...

New Zealand's space presented a hundred foot screen showing a statically painted mural... scrolling, right to left, which movement triggered vignettes to become animated as they processed, being gradually replaced by a next story, all handsomely stylized in an idyllic manner
triggering inherently residual memories of colonial comfort.

 

Arrival at the end of the building invited celebration...

This alley, parallel to the building & pacing toward the exit, invited... at the conclusion of an intense day... absorption & distillation.
Time to contemplate a martini at Harry's!

I wrote in my journal: 'The Giaradini was a bit disappointing yesterday."
That after the Arsenale & before deeper cogitation...

The Giaradini's central building suggests being four-square... having an octagonal dome...

Four pieces by John Waters, hung thus in each of the corner vestibules,
 observing succinctly the games of the art world
which happily I mostly left many years ago.

Peeking into the cafe was dizzying!

Balanced by...

This first glimpse of the Hungarian Pavilion piqued satisfaction inside

its portal of Nouveau exuberance.

Gondolas are becoming rarer, but this stalwart example battled some rough water as we passed on the vaporetto... the larger boats which are the city's water bus system...

This long post does not begin to share the full experience of Venice, so I am planning to later make several shorter posts about those details. This verbose writer is continuing a life-long practice learning literally to communicate... 

Patience Please!