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Backdrop (Venice)

Group Show You Gotta Say Yes To Another Access, 2017

Curated by Jan Kaila and Henk Slager

Research Pavilion, In the context of the 57th Venice Biennale

Installation on San Marco Square

Videoscenic Installation in the Sala del Camino

3 videos (Color/Sound/3x2'24'')

Backdrop (Venice) is an installation and a theatre piece. It is a free reenactment, or partial reconstruction in situ, of Canaletto’s painting La Commedia dell’Arte sulla Piazza San Marco (circa 1720). I temporarily installed the piece in Venice, on the San Marco Square, in May 2017, in the context of the 57^th Art Biennale, as part of the group show You Gotta Say Yes to Another Access at the Research Pavilion (II). The device is made up of a large semitransparent polyethylene greenhouse film hung on a removable backstage arch made of steel theatre fly bars. In the reference painting La Commedia dell’Arte sulla Piazza San Marco, Giovanni Antonio Canal, a.k.a. Canaletto (who started to paint by helping his father realize theatre landscape backdrops for Venetian Sant’Angelo and San Cassiano theatres), depicts a stage setting for a theatre performance at sunset on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. As it can be seen in the veduta, monochromatic sheets were traditionally used as stage backdrop in order to frame the performance and focus attention on the proscenium. This separation of the stage from its surrounding environment aimed at enhancing the centripetal intensity of the (human) drama. With the installation Backdrop (Venice), I seek to transpose the Western theatre architecture – based historically on the production of anthropocentric attention – onto an apparatus that expands the (notion of) the stage. Hence, the backdrop here becomes the actor who performs by being “played” by random winds and airflow. With this work I am interested in testing how the scenic logic of segregation between stage and backstage potentially morph into a dynamic of inclusion and codependency, the produced stage emerging as a contingent dispositive of multi-agential assemblage, porosity, and pluritemporality. The backdrop thus does not operate as a functional separation anymore but as an animated passage, suggesting that nothing may exist outside of the stage any longer.

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