Into the Labyrinth
Photo Exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia from 17 June to 21 August 2016.
Photographies by Riccardo De Cal, exhibition project by Melissa Siben.
Curated by Cabiria.
As J.L. Borges suggests, a labyrinth is "a building created to confuse people", in the sense that its own architecture is functional for this purpose: to generate confusion and stupor in humans. Its tortuous paths refer symbolically to the inadequacy of a purely rational view of the reality, whose ontological consistency conceals, under an apparent regularity, more complex and deeper meanings: who enters in a labyrinth knows that there is a path leading out, but it’s not possible being aware of which of the many paths will lead to exit. Hesitating is the norm. When reaching a cul de sac, the only possibility is to get back and try another way. Sometimes, just when it seems to be closer to the exit, it is farther away, and just a false step can bring to the starting point.
Such is the city of Venice, inextricably linked to the image of "water labyrinth", represented in the alchemical book "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", preserved at the Marciana Library, the book that firstly introduces to the Eastern sciences, then acquired and studied in the Western civilization.
City-architecture whole and more than any other, artificial, as strongly willed and built by man over an hostile environment, it is here decoded like an “exploded” tridimensional labyrinth, where the images represent stages of a seemingly open path, but on which "hangs" a maze of possible alternatives.
