NOVE VISTE (Or Abelardo Morell in my grandmother's house)

 

The series is composed of 9 photographs (Nove Viste: Nine views), where various views of the city of Venice, in Italy, are filling the rooms of an empty house in the historical centre of the island. The light is the only one left to occupy the space and it interjects, like a see through layer, the traces of life left on the walls.

 

The photographs were realised by creating pin holes on the windows of the house and letting the light project the outside view on the internal walls. This technique very old and pre-dating the invention of photography, is borrowed as a tribute to the work of the Cuban-American artist Abelardo Morell and used here to discuss some of the dynamics that characterise the contemporary island of Venice such as abandonment and depopulation, but common also to other similarly fragile places.

 

Nove Viste is the first collaboration between Giovanni and Daniele Sambo and it is part of a wider visual research that the two brothers are carrying on independently on landscape. The series of photographs was taken in the house where our paternal grandmother lived. The population of Venice is declining by half every generation (1951: about 150,000 people, 1983: about 80,000 people, 2023: about 40,000 people).

 

The work was realised as a limited-edition series (5) of Pigment print on archival paper, 42x60 cm, in 2022. In 2023 a limited edition (5) mini artist books were released in postcard sized boxes containing the nine views.