A busy schedule in Venice leads to illuminating walks through old heritage structures, lectures in the open, and a poetic universe
The moon rising against the backdrop of the church of Maria della Salute, as seen from the historic Accademia bridge over the Grand Canal
Autumn manifests so uniquely in Venice. After two sunny, blue-skied days, I finally encountered the mythical fog that sits over land and water, like a gauzy veil, wrapping the city in an uncanny stillness. I arrived here a day after delivering a lecture at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, along with my co-fellows, and had to immerse myself immediately in the workshop I was invited to conduct by the Bern University of Applied Sciences as part of a theory seminar for architecture students.
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It’s been exciting to be located in a different quarter of Venice after having spent three summer months in Castello. I’m right beside the Arts Academy in Dorsoduro, and I am feasting on the particularities that distinguish this area from other parts of Venice. Through my east-facing window, I can glimpse the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, and before it, the church of Santa Maria della Salute. If I peer out leftwards, I can see the bell tower of St Mark’s Cathedral. Two minutes away is Zattere, from where I can take the ferry to wherever I need to go.
Being with students is always an enriching experience. The workshop I’m conducting is called Street Haunting in Venice, inspired by the 1927 essay by Virginia Woolf, in which she decides to walk across London in search of a pencil. I welcomed the opportunity to formalise some of the methodologies I have evolved as a feminist writer, like developing one’s intuition while embracing chance as a navigational tool and various manners of active and passive listening that allow for an absorption of atmosphere. As someone who believes in learning as a form of resistance, I was keen to take discourse outside of closed rooms and into public domains.
We held our first session together at the large public park, Sant’Elena, which feels like the tip of Venice that veers towards Lido. I called it a picnic lecture, and instead of active instruction, I encouraged the students to set out on a little foraging expedition.
Our second session was by the water’s edge at the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. It was somewhat magical. It was 10 am and we were enveloped by light fog as we sat on the jetty. I led the class through a meditative exercise in locating their selves and their bodies, after which we read together in French a text by Édouard Glissant called The Black Beach before heading up to the bell tower for one of the most astonishing views of the lagoon.
This morning I wanted to contrast the vertiginous experience with something more subterranean. I led the students to the crypt of San Zaccaria, which is frequently flooded with water. I had handwritten for each one of them a piece of text—either an excerpt from a poem or prose and even from theory—revolving around the theme of water, lightning, colour, and radiance. Working on this last evening helped me access the poetic universe in which I dwell. For instance, I had this piece from Anne Carson about a piece of quartz her brother once showed her that contained, according to him, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. “He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.” This poem shared a resonance with an excerpt from a poem by Audre Lorde, called Coal—“Love is a word another kind of open—/ As a diamond comes into a knot of flame/ I am black because I come from the earth’s inside/ Take my word for jewel in your open light.”—whis was woven in with an excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets in which she speaks about Plato’s theory about a ‘visual fire’ that burns between our eyes and that which they behold; and Rebecca Solnit, who writes in A Field Guide for Getting Lost about the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky and the blue at the furthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. “This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the colour blue.”
As I write this, my students are literally haunting the streets of Venice doing (hopefully) some of the tasks I gave them as instructions, creating their own trajectories and infusing the city with their gestures and memories. By the time you read this, I will mostly be returning to Tramin, where I hope to be stationed for at least 10 days before I travel again to Innsbruck. I am wrestling with the simultaneity of my various work callings. Even while conducting the workshop, I have proofreading work to finish, a piece of text to record for a podcast, this column deadline, jury work for an exhibition, and catching up on the Italian classes I’ve missed. It puzzles me how I can accommodate so much within my consciousness without feeling too exorbitantly stressed.
I think it is because I deeply enjoy all of the things I do as work. Not only do I derive pleasure from them, but the various vocations feed each other so that there is a metabolic dimension to how I live, breathe, think, feel, and dream. Which reminds of the two-line excerpt by Anne Carson I had a student read—“Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.”
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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