1999

Public art project and multi-channel video installation 

Commissioned by Harald Szeemann for the 48th Venice Biennale

Loop: 68’14” / 07’17”| Variable dimensions

36 Venetians from different neighbourhoods, professions and social classes were filmed at a certain moment of the day, when they would eventually change clothes. Whether inside their homes or at their work places, the artists captured the passage from private to public in all of its intimacy and frailty, as a kind of automatized ritual of modern life, when the inner and outer worlds meet. In audio voiceover, these real individuals narrate their own deaths as if they had already happened. So as they dress for work in the morning or for a date in the evening, we learn how it was they “died”.

Every gesture in Venice takes on a theatrical quality. The city itself is like a stage. Pictures of it have become so widespread and media–soaked that when we see the original we can’t help comparing it with the reproductions drilled into our minds. Venice stages Venice daily. Those who visit the city find themselves caught up in the drama. Throughout the centuries, the myth of the sinking city creates the perfect stage for the drama of our civilization. Air and water meet above uncertain ground.