The duplicate echo. Reverberations around the city of Venice

Abstract

Venice inoculates an inspiring force into the artists who try to capture it. The result of the relationship between the city-museum and the creator is a collection of works based on destruction and resurgence. The proposed repository of artistic pieces contains recurrent and common patterns that reveal the repetitive continuity of the History of Art: in a kind of palliative strategy, replication, duplication, copying or version appears as an instrument of salvation of a city destined to disappear. The ashes of a theatre, the silhouette of a body charred in the sand or the construction of an ark for a titan argue a story about the destructive action of fire and water. From Enric Miralles to Luigi Nono, repeating a reverberating fatal fate around the burning ashes of the destroyed architecture and its subsequent rebirth, music appears as that balsam to the inexorable catabasis. The route travelled aims to endorse the redemptive capacity of music, revealing some traces of the cyclical history of art that lead the city and its artistic production to resort to the versioning of its ancient buildings, forms and notes.