Manuela Gandini
The Venetian Man
The Tale of a Traveller
 
in “Projected artists - Obiettivo: Roma III/V”
Studio Stefania Miscetti, Rome
2RC Edizioni d'Arte,
catalogue of the exhibition
Rome, 1996
 

A star-filled sky accompanies the traveller as he journeys, by day and by night.
His gaze uncertain; the water, like the road, never still.A man is walking. A woman, in profile, with her eyes closed. She is perfectly still. Immobile. She lives in an advertisement, alongside a sign indicating the stops on the subway.

Lordure, lordure!

When he comes out the tunnel – or possibly before entering it – the man is accompanied by two men. He holds his hat in his hand. He sees a gondola on the horizon. The Venetian Man is a metropolitan pilgrim. At times he loses his sense of direction and allows himself to be led by the light of fire works. He ignores the direction of the ferry headlights illuminating this small part of the night, every night, at the same time. At times he has eyes for nothing and for no one.
The sound of a saxophone solo can be heard in the distance on this black and white journey through the night, on the lagoon, in the city, in the mud beneath the neon lights of the sometimes decaying roofs.
Suddenly is the 1940s: a fragrance of herbs, a woman seated in an armchair, her features confused, the lack of focus pushes her back, away from time.
A mother? A lover? A child?
From the salon of the Doges Palace, the Venetian Man can see two gothic windows, two huge maps of the world, a statue. The man in the statue is duration.
The traveller is removed from time. He has no thoughts, the sharp sword-like reflections from the water force him to close his eyes.
A different house in a different city: pagoda-shaped and non- Venetian.
An original Chinese manuscript in which four is ‘matter’ and three ‘spirit’.
Together they make seven, which is ‘knowledge’.
“I look at the sky above Venice – writes Abdullah Sidran in The Coffin of Sarajevo. God is up there and all over. One God. He who created the Universe, seven billion worlds in the Universe, and each with myriad languages and peoples. And just one Venice for each. And He created a small population in one those worlds in a region they call Europe, belonging to the tribe of the southern Slavs. And on the border, Bosnia, Bosnia, Bosnia. Here they touch and the fight, the cross of the East and the cross of the West, born from the same cross”.The man continues on his way, his steps echoing in the long, narrow calle. His head is filled with fire. A car speeds along the highway between California and New Mexico. The road signs are hazy, they overlap. Dream.
All the pieces of life come together in the insignificant passage of time,
projected on the walls of Rome, in the original unity of the individual.
The ten images become one, confirming the sum. At the crossroad linking East and West the Venetian Man slowly and hastily progresses on his solitary journey in a Warhol-like immobility, protected by the profile of New York. Maurizio Pellegrin’ s tale is about duration. Peter Handke would agree; in his last song he wrote:
“Those who have never experienced duration have not lived”.