Venezia Pop Project

Venezia Pop Project is a project by the artist Michele De Marchi, a site-specific exhibition in the heart of the Jewish ghetto of Venice, hosted by the Imago Ars Cultural Association. Among objects, newsy and colorful postcards, the exhibition space becomes not an ordinary newsstand. An exhibition that implies the drastic change that the city is undergoing: unsustainable tourism, large cruise ships along the Canal, the Mose, the stinking of the roads and the forced exodus to which Venice is subjected because of a city become unlivable due to the lack of essential shops for everyday life. The monotony of the offer, including masks, glasses and gadgets of all kinds is reproposed here in a totally ironic key. The images come from the web, are downloaded, manipulated, copied and shared, photomontages that create a detachment between the real photo and the new reproduced image. The real protagonists are the animals: marine dinosaurs, frogs, bears, dragons and elephants, just to name a few, are inserted inside frames well known to us from Piazza San Marco, along the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge. They are the interpreters of catastrophic omens, they constitute a warning, an exhortation to reflection. Similarly to neo-Dadaist, quoting Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made and Piero Manzoni’s conceptualism, Michele De Marchi invents the Mose’s bottled water, and the crap is not the product of an artist, rather it is the one of a dog. Not only that, among the various souvenirs of artists, we find the most famous bottle air that is not Parisian, but Venetian. A reflection on hit-and-run tourism, where the city of Venice is prey to hordes of people, to shops that offer useless and meaningless objects, and the city suffers (un)aware of the blow. An invitation to take care of our territory, of our city, to remind us that Venice is a great playground, at the mercy of mass tourism, linked to management issues that overall affect livability. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want. A.Warhol