MEMOIRS OF THE ELEPHANT

2011

Mixed media, Text.

 

 

Memoirs of the Elephant is a reflection on the nature of city, of how the perception of the latter may be changed or altered through the overlapping of real and fictional narratives. The city of Venice is scrutinized and reinterpreted through the memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, one of Mozart’s librettists. Through the use of his own memoirs, and of various historical texts that describe Venice, I have made a written account of the city, described through Da Ponte and the characters he encounters, a multitude of viewpoints that interpret through reality and fantasy what Venice is.This text is the first part of the project; afterwards I made a white information board, and stuck it in the middle of one of the marshes that dot the venetian lagoon. On the board, a map of what looks like Venice but is in reality a fictonal plant of a similar city explains the use and history of the highlighted places with unknown facts and anectodes of the real Venice. Virtually inaccessible, unless you have rubber boots, this information board refuses to offer itself to public scrutiny; it is a possible reality, another city that exists throughout a different viewpoint, more removed from reality than present in it.

 

 

1) View of the information board, with Venice in the distance.

2) Closeup of the board, with the drawing of a fictional city, resembling Venice.

3) The Marsh as a non-place near the airport, a place seen from the passenger seat but never walked on.