Throughout October, November and December, I’ll be documenting walks I make in Venice using images and text, then making a series of prints and books at the International School of Graphics, inspired by De Barbari’s woodcut map of 1500 and other 16th Century printed manuals and guides.
In the introductory chapter of “Venice is a Fish” (1) Tiziano Scarpa urges the visitor to throw away the map and vagare: to wander ‘vaguely’. The journeys recorded here will be in that spirit: metaphorical, symbolic, mythogeographical drifts. Many will use chance principles and game strategy to decide direction, none will be from A to B, and most will include what P.D.A. Harvey describes as “a disorderly mix of fact, fiction and fantasy, compiled from personal observation, hearsay, and a variety of historical and poetic sources”(2).
Central to this work is the research that simultaneously weaves together and unravels the threads of the Venetian tapestry. So I’m asking academics, artists and walkers to contribute their thoughts, their knowledge, their asides and anecdotes to this blog and to create a ‘cloud’ of brief contributions that might resonate with each other and help me create more informed work.
(1) Tiziano Scarpa: ‘Venezia è un Pesce’ Feltrinelli 2000.
(2) Bronwen Wilson: ‘Francesco Lupazzolo’s Isolario of 1638: the Aegean Archipelago and Early Modern Historical Anthropology’ from ‘Reflections on Renaissance Venice’.
