My research starts with the Incurables neighborhood in Venice. This was the beautiful and peaceful place where Iosif Brodskij used to live every winter and the place that inspired his reflections about time, architecture and absolute beauty in Venice with “The Quayside of the Incurables” (first published in 1989 by Consorzio Venezia Nuova and then officially published in 1991 by Adelphi, Milan).

This neighborhood is now quiet and full of flowers, a typical residential area, but its name come from the Incurables' Hospital the big building that stands in front of the Canale della Giudecca that is now location of the Fine Arts Academy of Venice. From 1517 to 1806 this building was the place for men, women and children affected by incurable diseases like plague and syphilis.

 

My research about the Incurables' Hospital was a good starting point for my artwork, but I needed to connect these informations to something else. While I was wandering inside Venice searching for a good place for my next exposition I noticed that the city has some abandoned buildings, left alone since a long time ago, damaged by weather, animals and time in general. In such a touristic city, it’s strange to notice how these buildings are in the same time present and absent: they are not seen, not considered and they will never appear in a touristic photo. The condition of these places is similar to the incurable people, there is no more hope for them, for different reason they are not rebuild nor reused, they simply stand.

They are not considered building, but still they are; like incurable people who were considered dead, although they were still alive.

With my work I want to express this condition of incurability of buildings, I want to commemorate this limbo between death and life.

 

Since I worked with abandoned buildings as they were sick people, I decided to do a scientific analysis about them and to create a simple statement in order to choose which building is incurable and which is not.

The building is completely uninhabited and has not an official function;

It is not being restructured nor it’s going to be demolished;

Its interior can be seen because it’s easy to enter or because it’s visible from outside;

The building has to have missing pieces like glass of the window, doors, roof, or other architectural elements;

The building has to have rusted parts, vegetation and animals that infest the building (I’ve found insects, seagulls, pigeons and rats).

 

The buildings I chose are in Venice, inside the six quarters of the city: San Polo, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, Santa Croce, San Marco, Castello and also in the island called Giudecca that is considered part of the city. In each incurable place I decided to pick up carefully a damaged part of the building or the main cause of disease, in order to analyze it, as a doctor usually does.

My work consists of ten suspended phials of glass, fastened with transparent strings to a lattice of metal cables that I found in the Incurable small square (Campiello degli Incurabili) behind the Incurable Hospital and near to Brodskij’s house.

Each phial stands for a building and its incurability. The audience is given a map through which spectators can easily find the location of the ten buildings and some information about them. The goal is to make people aware of these places and their conditions and to give them the possibility to visit these buildings in a way similar to sightseeing.