Veneziafantasma

This project was born from the desire to show the symbiotic relationship between Venice and its main source of income, in a poetic way, without judgement. I was looking for beauty in the contradictions, between fascination for an urban masterpiece and overstimulation, quality of life and sustenance, reality and fantasy.

I decided to use candid shots, and to return to the same spaces at night, to create mismatched double exposures.

I wanted to show the rich textures and spatial qualities of the city through the obscuring crowd, in dual images full of contradictions.

However, progress on my long-term plans were abruptly halted by the European outbreak of COVID-19. Carnaval was suddenly cancelled ; in a single day, Venice emptied, and the very phenomenon I wished to document vanished for more than a year. The photographs stayed the same, yet the project’s meaning had shifted - the image of an empty city then inevitably associated with the pandemic.

In 2022, the virus has now become a part of our everyday life; the monthly dance between normal life and lockdowns unsurprising. The phenomenon I wanted to highlight, the great dichotomy between an incredibly lively day life and a desert nightlife in the same urban space, the incredible sensory impact of our presence in urban streets, became visible all around the world. The project lost both its singularity and gained a universal character.

This is what I find interesting about this project today - its shifting meaning. Built out of the certitude of a constant and site-specific urban phenomenon, it became an accidental documentation of an international crisis. At the same time, it represents for me a lost hope in something I had built methodically and meant to be bigger, more ambitious. My certitudes and plans didn't really work out in the way I had envisioned. Maybe that feeling is the most universal of all. And maybe that's ok.