With the opening of the 18. Biennale di Architettura around the corner, the city of Venice is starting to liven up thanks to events and art installations around the city. Among these, we can find “Radials” of the Collettivo Sbagliato, a site-specific installation that will be inaugurated tomorrow 18 May at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. 

Collettivo Sbagliato, Radials, 2023, Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venezia
Courtesy La Nuova Venezia

Sbagliato suggests for the fourth floor and for the building portico facing Canal Grande two different variations of the same artistic idea: the creation of unexpected “gaps” inside the architectural order of the sixteenth-century structure. This is meant to ask the observer questions about reality and the subjectivity of vision. The five arches which close the “loggia d’acqua” are reproduced and multiplied, generating an infinite perspective. The spectator is disoriented by this vision, where solids and voids create new landscapes and angles.

The installation continues on the fourth floor, where the Roman Collettivo proposes again a courtyard section decontextualized and multiplied on the four room walls. The recalling to water and wave movements is a praise to the lagoon city, which is here reproduced in an dreamlike and atemporal ambient. The illusions created by these “gaps” are asking again the visitor to abandon theirselves and detach from reality to be transported to a parallel and intangible world.

Collettivo Sbagliato, Rest of the World – Uncommissioned, 2011, Isola D’Elba
Courtesy Collettivo Sbagliato

The Collettivo Sbagliato conducts a specific action idea: the visual error and the optical illusion have the capacity to really exist, even when the represented element is effectively not present. The goal is always to confuse the observer and invite him to move away from reality, offering new urban perspectives.