Backdrop (Venice), 2017
Views of the installation in the Sala del Camino (1 & 3) and on San Marco Square (2)
Group Show You Gotta Say Yes To Another Access
Curated by Jan Kaila and Henk Slager
Research Pavilion, In the context of the 57th Venice Biennale
3 videos (Colour / Sound / 3 x 2´24´´)
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Backdrop (Venice) is an installation and a theater piece.
It is made of a large semi-transparent polyethylene greenhouse film hung to a removable backstage arch (steel pipes).
In his painting « La commedia dell’Arte sulla piazza San Marco» (1720-1723), Giovanni Antonio Canal, a.k.a. Canaletto - who started to paint helping his father to realize theater landscape backdrops for Venetian Sant’Angelo and San Cassiano theaters - pictures a stage setting for a theater performance at the sunset on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
As can be seen in the veduta, monochromatic sheets were traditionally used as stage backdrop in order to isolate the representation and focus the attention on the proscenium. This separation of the stage from its surrounding environment aimed at enhancing the centripetal intensity of the (human) drama.
The outdoor and indoor air-played installation Backdrop (Venice) critically transposes the Western theatre architecture, historically based on the production of an anthropocentric attention, into an apparatus of expansion of the (notion of) stage. Hence the backdrop becomes here the actor who plays by being played by random winds and air-flows. The backdrop doesn't thus operate as a functional separation anymore; but as an animated passage, suggesting that there might be nothing outside of the stage anylonger. The scenic logic of segragation morphs into a dynamic of inclusion and codependency; the produced stage emerging as a contigent dispositif of multiagential assemblage, porosity and pluritemporality.
