Nebula

A polyphonic text on expanding the film experience into landscape

What if expanded cinema not only referred to cinema as a projection in space, but to the transportation of the immaterial experience of a film out of the black box and into the landscape or urbanscape? This is a “different” line of thought and experience that is worth exploring if we are to reconsider the notion of expanded cinema – as a tool for envisioning change and creating a space to inhabit in times of crisis. This is the “experimental” line of thought we proposed for a walk-and-talk with a group of artists, curators and scholars. Starting from a film, Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Nebula (2024), we embarked from the exhibition space and on to a specific place in the landscape, the island of Sant’Andrea in the Venetian lagoon. The island with its architecture – a fortress built in the 16^th century to protect the city of Venice – has become an object of speculation about its sustainable futures. Just recently, a global competition invited the submission of proposals to reinvent the site and its possible uses, taking into account the history and fragility of the lagoon’s ecosystem. What can the expansion of cinematic experience contribute to this speculation?

In the following polyphonic text, Fabienne Liptay and Giuseppe Di Salvatore have curated the several inputs of the participants of the Venice event. The montage of statements is composed as a fragmentary jam session and intended to be a scenario for a rehearsal, a tool for inspiration and a starting point of an ongoing dialogue between film, architecture and landscape.

Kick-off: Nebula (Latin for “mist” or “cloud”; in astronomy “a cloud of dust and gas in outer space”): This is the title of Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s most recent film, which echoes the original title of the Venice exhibition that hosts it at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and Alessandro Rabottini of the Fondazione In Between Art Film. While the exhibition’s aim is to bring film and architecture into dialogue, Andreotta Calò’s film explicitly displays the architecture of the Ospedaletto as the place where the film was shot and where it is exhibited. The former use of the architecture as a hospital, haunted by the history of the ill and deceased, is clearly visible as the camera focuses on the abandoned spaces of the Ospedaletto. They are experienced through the erring or exploring gaze of a solitary sheep.

[All photos: Samuele Cherubini]

Giovanni Giacomo Paolin: As well as providing the spatial context that the artworks inhabit, the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto is also the symbolic sounding board for the stories they tell. The exhibition layout is punctuated by the architectural interventions created by the interdisciplinary studio 2050+, with passages that manifest the concept of nebulosity through materials and surfaces that absorb or amplify sound and light. The entire Complesso dell’Ospedaletto is turned into a form of sensory architecture, a porous and tactile space in which stories, images and voices extend beyond the confining dimensions of the rooms.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: A film representing architecture can have the same advantages and disadvantages of musealisation: I would say – referring to a brilliant distinction of the curators of the Riga Medical Museum – the disadvantage of remembrance as sheer homage paying, and the advantage of being able to produce a transfer of memories.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: In the exhibition, my film has a double mirror effect. The film explicitly mirrors the architecture of the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto. In the physical experience of the exhibition at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, the architecture also echoes the film, because, for example, the viewer’s experience of the oval staircase after the room where Nebula is screened cannot but trigger the memory of an important sequence of the film.

Noemi Quagliati: I was struck by the relationship between the sheep and the Baroque elliptical staircase made by the architect Giuseppe Sardi in the mid-17th century. The ascent to the sky typical of the Baroque style is contrasted by the descent of the sheep in the film sequence. It is as if the sheep and the stairs were intertwined in a dialectic way: the first referring to the earth, the second to the sky. Moreover, the sheep’s movement within the staircase is accompanied by fog that, at a certain point, appears in this scene, becoming a thick cloud. Here, Hubert Damisch’s book Théorie du nuage (1972) comes to mind. This study identifies the volatile and contourless pictorial character of the cloud as the only element capable of contradicting the rigour of linear perspective, one of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

Fabienne Liptay: If Nebula moves from the earth, the mud in which the sheep’s feet are standing at the film’s beginning, into the clouds and the heavens, this movement also reverses the trajectory of a previous sculptural work by Giorgio. Derived from core samples of caranto clay, which were extracted from the undersea earth in the Venice lagoon, from the sinking foundations of Venice, his Carotaggi (2018-2019) are impressive examples of the sculptural unearthing of what lies deep within the Venice lagoon. In Nebula, the camera traverses space in the opposite direction, moving from the ground upwards into white fog and finally into complete blackness. It is an exploration of blind vision, delving into history and the future, expanding into imagination.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: The dialectic of black and white is quite interesting in Nebula. The recurrence of foggy scenes is systematically balanced by the use of black screens, a sort of a punctuation of the film.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: I wanted to be explicit with the use of the mist in the film, because in my eyes it is more important to focus on the variation and development of the motif of “nebula” than on the choice of the motif itself. In plainly declaring this motif visually, the viewer has time to seize the important nuances of the film.

Ilaria Grippa: Be it the result of the explicit use of mist or not, I have the impression that the narrative, the strong visual language and the style adopted for Nebula have the ability to suspend space and time.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: The suspension of space and time makes me reflect on an important distinction concerning “nebula”: suspension is not confusion and, at least here, the mist does not bring confusion but a sort of concentration, a presence. It is exactly the experience of being in the midst of a heavy fog, for example: the elimination of panorama from landscape anchors us in the present, the fact of being there.

Fabienne Liptay: We are used to thinking of cinema as an experience that immerses us in another space on the screen, while making our surrounding disappear from our sight or attention, but in Giorgio’s Nebula, it is precisely our surrounding that we are also experiencing on the screen, yet maybe not on the same plane of experience or consciousness. Our conception of this space is expanded – both in physical and imaginative terms. To me, this seems to provide a form of experiential complexity that brings site-specificity to the sensation of being suspended in time and space. It is a form of dislocation in the present.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: With Nebula, I return to a former work of mine, VI Donne, which I made in Sassari, Sardinia, in 2007 in a former psychiatric hospital. Together with other artists, I was invited to recover the historical site and rethink its use. For Nebula, I discovered the woman who figures as a medium in the film outside of the Ospedaletto, where she was sitting. She is a patient of the psychiatric institution nearby the Ospedaletto. It was a strange coincidence, that she was speaking to me about seeing white fog, while I was making a film on “nebula”. For me, this was a way of revisiting my former work with the women in VI Donne, but also a recovery of the history of the specific site in the very present.

Ilaria Grippa: It is fascinating to explore how the way of looking at the environment, or the way of experiencing the past has changed. It would be interesting to analyse how much the medium of film has transformed our perception, for example in comparison to archival photography, and how cinema can raise awareness and support the process of elaborating issues that involve a community and its territory.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: In the film Nebula, the position of the camera alternates very close views with images that underline the architecture’s volumes and the layers of frames. Body and architecture play together, and one against the other. The centrality of framing is challenged twice, by the intimacy of the animal body and by the sheep often disappearing hors cadre. To my eyes, décadrage – de-framing – is a keyword for Nebula, which means decentration, lateral perspective, accent on the borders, breaking the constraints of (social and political) framing.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: The central part of the film is mystical, dreamy, I make moderate use of slow motion, but it was important for me, at the beginning and the end of Nebula, to express hardship through raw images, a different quality of images, with a clearly documentary touch. I like to play with reversing movements, which always triggers a shift of perspective, or an exploration of borders and limits.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: At the end of the film, I found a suggestive double reversal: the woman speaks of seeing her room as completely white, then stating that for her the sky is not blue but black. If we take the room as figure of the cinema theatre, and the sky as figure of the world outside, then we get a white cinema theatre and a black world. This is a double reversal that blurs the distinction between film experience and the experience of the world; it pushes us to imagine the world cinematically, and the cinema worldly. This exemplifies exactly the movement of expanding the film experience out of the black box and into the landscape, which we are exploring while going from the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto to the island of Sant’Andrea.

Pamela Breda: The act of moving film out of the black box and into the world outside transforms both the medium and the spaces it inhabits. In Venice, a city intertwined with its aquatic environment and steeped in layers of history, this approach allows for a deeper interaction with place. Films projected into the spaces in which they were shot, onto the façades of historic buildings, screened in the open spaces of the lagoon, merge with their surroundings, creating a dialogue between the on-screen narrative and the natural and cultural landscape.
This method of expanded cinema recontextualizes architecture and environment, not just as static backdrops but as active participants in the narrative. The physical presence of the viewer in these spaces amplifies the film’s themes, fostering a greater awareness and emotional connection to the issues at hand.

Paolo Rosso: The history of the island of Sant’Andrea, strategically placed in front of the main passage between the lagoon and the sea, is already particularly loaded with meanings. Its task to protect Venice and the lagoon against access from the sea has actually been contradicted by History, insofar as the fortress that was built at the moment of maximal expansion of Venice (the beginning of 16^th century) has never really been used – the only moment a cannon was fired from Sant’Andrea, it coincided with the end of the Serenissima and the independence of Venice. These historical facts have proven that defence is constantly intertwined with fragility: the historical buildings of the fortress on the island have constantly been repaired and reinforced, also against the threat of sinking.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: Another symbolic aspect to which the island of Sant’Andrea has been witness concerns the relationship between Venice and the sea not only in terms of defence but also of domination and supremacy. “Supremacy” is literally at the core of one of the most important historical ceremonies in Venice, the “wedding with the sea”, where the Doge comes to Sant’Andrea to throw a ring in the waters as “sign of eternal connection with, and supremacy over, the sea.” A renewed version of this relationship of domination can be seen through the controversial project of the MOSE, which has been built just in front of the island of Sant’Andrea. This relationship can and should be questioned, of course, from the point of view of an ecosystem that would let porosity and exchange prevail on walls and boundaries.

Paolo Rosso: Together with Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Marco Bravetti, we rented a little part of the island for a period of 18 years. Until now, we have involved many people and cultural institutions in order to share a project that is principally thought of in terms of the preservation of the island as it is: as place of inspiration at the crossroads of art, culture and the ecology of the lagoon. The idea of involving many different players' participation in the project is meant to assure respect of the island, to make it a laboratory of shared practices, protecting it as a place that should be as accessible and public as possible.
The current open call for renting the rest and main part of the island has triggered an important reflection about its use and meaning within the suffering ecosystem of the lagoon and has motivated us to enhance our level of commitment and our need to exchange and share ideas.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: It might seem odd, but the first task I gave myself in approaching the island of Sant’Andrea was to “do nothing”. But “doing nothing” also means doing something: rather than physically building up the island, from the very beginning I was attracted to the idea of building a consciousness of the place.

Fabienne Liptay: The proposal that Giorgio is making for Sant’Andrea – to turn the fortress once built for the protection of Venice into a place in need of protection itself – can be understood as a form of inversion borrowed from his sculptural work. When I visited Giorgio in his studio, I saw a bricola, one of the wooden poles in the Venice lagoon from which he modelled his Clessidre (2010-2018), bronze sculptures that are named after the hourglass because of their shape. Eroded in the section where water and air meet on the surface of the lagoon, they are very thin and fragile, at risk of breaking, while the upper and lower parts, reaching down underwater and up into the air are thick and strong. You can turn an hourglass upside down. This suggests that the sculptures can also invert the trajectories of their interrogation with the landscape, folding the archaeological and the imaginary into each other. With his proposal for Sant’Andrea, Giorgio is applying a sculptural idea to the island.

Pamela Breda: Sant’Andrea, an interface between land and sea, human habitation and natural wilderness, is a delicate ecosystem, a living metaphor for the fragility and defence of the place that is the narrative of Giorgio’s film. The ruins of Sant’Andrea echo the architectural abandonment depicted in the film, standing as testaments to the impermanence and resilience of human and natural creations. This mirroring effect is not just visual but existential, prompting reflections on the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: The architecture of Sant’Andrea could be seen as a ruin, that is through the lens of the aesthetics of ruins. Following a brilliant intuition of the architect Luigi Snozzi, ruins themselves are especially important for architecture: «Architecture comes from concrete needs, but is able to go beyond them: if you want to discover it, look at the ruins». It is the idea that the architecture gets visibility when its function is suspended. Ruins would work as a dysfunctional tool for making architecture visible, and this seems to be coherent with the aesthetics of ruins as focused on aesthetics, on perception, on the contemplation of the visible – which is the continuation of the aesthetics of still life (natura morta). Yet, that is only one possible conception of ruins, the archaeologist one, that crystalised in the 18^th and 19^th century. Before that, a Venetian artist, Canaletto, was one of the first artist to “feature” ruins in what he called «vedute ideate». The constructing attitude of this ideal visions continues with the genre of capricci, as defined by Filippo Baldinucci (1681). I like to polarise the modern attitude towards ruins, which is nostalgic and contemplative, with the constructive and imaginative attitude of the baroque time, wishing for Sant’Andrea the negotium of invention to the otium of contemplation.

Fabienne Liptay: A negotium with space is also a negotiation and re-negotiation of space, which is exactly what the activity of walking is. In walking, we can also access a dimension of Giorgio’s artistic practice that remains excluded from the mere viewing of his works in the exhibition space. This does not only apply to the several journeys on foot on which he embarked: from Amsterdam to Venice (Ritorno, 2011), along the Ligurian coast up to the French border with a group of other artists (Genova Ventimiglia Genova, 2013), from Venice to L'Aquila along the fracture of the tectonic plates between Eurasia and Africa after the earthquake that shook Italy in 2016 (Gloria, 2019), or around the Venetian lagoon in a solitary movement during pandemic times (lacuna, 2021). The trajectory of a movement that traces the fragile geography of a space, unearthing its historical strata, and imagining its future, is inherent also to his artistic practice.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò: In Nebula, however, I don’t wander myself but try to follow the wandering of a sheep (which is depicted in a painting by Andrea Celesti in the church of the Complesso). Now, it is suggestive to think about a simple fact: in order to make the solitary sheep that you see in the film wander, we had to use several sheep in the shooting process. A sheep, alone, is completely lost. In order to make it move, you need to separate it, so that it will try to join the other ones.

Ruth Baettig: The wandering of the sheep is not only a vehicle for us to feel the exploration of the space, a new, enigmatic space, as any abandoned space is. It is also a way to feel the positive aspect of being lost. Positive or, better, poetic. For many years, the expressions "I am lost / Mi sono perso / Ich habe mich verloren" have been a central theme in my artistic practice, and have been thought as occasions of re-start, from a moment of existential disorientation. Being lost, we are back to the present, to our presence, to our body, to the basic grammar of our existence.
To me, this is especially connected with waste land (terrain vague). To call it an abandoned space would make us focus only on the past; here and now, a terrain vague is a space of freedom, a space to both be lost in and re-invent ourselves, and re-invent the space.

Alice Jasmine Crippa: What does it mean to experience an art film through your feet? What does it take for your toes, skin, and calf muscles to formulate a critical response over a film sequence? What happens when they do?
I’ve always been interested in the techniques, practices, or “bodyways” that could help a work of art become part of the muscle memory of its viewers. Imagine art, experienced by more than just the mind. Art, fully embodied by its public, and decoded through the languages native to each organism.
The short walk at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto and the longer walk on the island of Sant’Andrea felt like that to me. The movements we performed became a way to take in Giorgio’s work in deeper and allow for more memories, feelings, and meanings to congregate around it. Some of the atmospheres which at the Ospedaletto were made of sight and sound, translated in Sant’Andrea into distinct smells, drops of temperatures, uneven surfaces, echoes of emptiness, and a thick sense of “ruination” engulfing our bodies. What happens to the relevance of a film when it can be experienced through various bodyways?

Fabienne Liptay: Walking is a physical action. It is also a practice of thinking (from the peripatetic school of Aristotle to Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin). Can walking also be a cinematic practice of expanding the experience of film out of the black box into urban space and the landscape? Our walk-and-talk does not intend to give an answer to this question but offer it to communal exploration. For sure, it is not simply an invitation to depart together from one place and arrive at another, but to lose our sense of knowing the place, to feel lost in order to encounter others. In this moment, we are situated, yet displaced – both the balance and imbalance walking is composed of. But we need to rehearse this kind of walking, so that walking can become a practice of unlearning landscape and its common exploration in guided tours – especially in a place like Venice.

Pamela Breda: The film captures the sheep’s movements with a contemplative and unhurried lens, allowing the viewer to fully absorb the juxtaposition of life amidst ruins. The sheep navigates the crumbling hallways and overgrown courtyards, its presence injecting a sense of gentle vitality into the stark and silent surroundings. This imagery underscores the themes of fragility and resilience, highlighting the persistence of life even in the midst of decay.

Ilaria Grippa: The persistence of life is literally experienced through our walk-and-talk, from the city of Venice to an island in the lagoon. This does not only concern space, but also time. In the film, the environment of the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto takes on an ever-changing charm, in line with time, the cycle of the seasons and the way space is experienced. The film was shot in the autumn, now we walk through it and live it in the summer. This means a significant change: the colours, the atmosphere, the conviviality makes the experience different and very intense. The common thread of both the film and the walk-and-talk throughout the afternoon is a feeling of convivial re-appropriation of space and place, from the Ospedaletto to Sant’Andrea, and a feeling of re-appropriation of the spaces in which humans and more-than-human beings live.

Noemi Quagliati: The experience on the island of Sant’Andrea stimulates my curiosity to go deeper into questions concerning human imprinting, human-animal coexistence, and co-transformation between species. 

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: Both the sheep and the psychiatric patient are figures of decentration, as such embodying the most important function of the debate on the more-than-human perspective – which is often bound to the debate of the so-called Anthropocene. What I find quite important in this debate is to go beyond the sterile attempt to overcome anthropomorphism – we can well project human features to more-than-human figures – and to focus on the criticism of anthropocentrism. The objective is not transcending the boundaries of being human and creating (or pretending to create) the exoteric or panic experience of more-than-human beings, but (humanly) assuming the more-than-human perspective as exercise of decentration and exploration of the continuity between the human and the more-than-human.

Noemi Quagliati: Watching a sheep in a Venetian building also made me think about the relationship between city and countryside as well as the intersections of animals, commodities, trades, and capitals - aspects that have been central to the success of the past Venetian Republic. This history can still be observed in the Venice toponymy as exemplified by Campo della Lana. Wool manufacturing in Venice started in the second half of the 15^th century, having its golden age in the 16^th century when the city established itself as one of Europe's top manufacturing centres. According to the historian Domenico Sella, in this period, «the production exploded from a few thousand “pannilana” up to 28.000. “A fabricar un panno alto [...] gli vole pesi quatro et megio di lana”, reads a document from the late 16^th century. If the information is correct and taking into account that one “peso” (weight) was equivalent to about 8 kg, it should be concluded that imports of raw wool rose from 150 tonnes in the second decade of the century, when the average annual production was 4.000 high quality cloths, to almost 900 tonnes at the end of the century when it exceeded 24.000» (see D. Sella, Storia di Venezia 1994, in Enciclopedia Treccani). Part of the valuable raw material was imported from Spain and sold in the Levantine markets after being manufactured in the Venetian woolen mills. Since animal studies is a recent field, finding specific information on herds and breeders is more complicated but would indeed deserve to be further investigated. 

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: From a symbolic point of view, a sheep could hint at lamb and its innocence, but at the beginning of the film, Nebula shows a lamb, then leaves the scene for a sheep that is no lamb at all. I like to read this as a way to explicitly eschew the heavy symbolism of innocence, purity, sacrifice. The film is loaded with complexity about these notions, which often are attributed to nature, calling for the protection of it. The issue of protection is delicate and, concerning the island of Sant’Andrea, I would like to challenge the positive attitude towards protection (of nature) – that is often taken for granted – in taking a clear stance against it. A quote by Nastassja Martin will serve to express this stance: «Exploitation and protection of environment are the two faces of the same ontology, a Western, modern and dialectic ontology. The common element behind both conceptions of environment is fundamental: the exteriority of the human being towards the environment. Through this exteriority, we get the sacralisation or the exploitation of the environment» (Les âmes sauvages: face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska, 2016). In any case, protection is not the opposite of intervention. Protection and preservation are forms of intervention that produce modifications of the environment.

Fabienne Liptay: There is a book on the Fortress of Sant’Andrea, which I found in a local bookshop and brought with me on the walk. Published in 1978 by the Venice section of the Istituto Italiano dei Castelli and written by Pietro Marchesi, it documents the efforts of an architectural preservation and renovation of the island’s fortress. Alongside architectural renovation, the book argues for the need of «a precise design indication of reuse» – making the proposal to re-use the island as a touristic port. How can other proposals for the rehabitation of Sant’Andrea be imagined? Following the sheep in Giorgio’s film into “nebula”, and from there to Sant’Andrea, we are invited to use our imagination, to imagine a proposal for the island beyond what seems possible or realistic (in terms of economic profitability).

Paolo Rosso: If we take into account the recent “re-use” of the island, beside our project, we should also consider the habit of some locals, teenagers actually, that perceive the island as a place of freedom, for having sex or using drugs for example. This perception reveals an attitude of exploitation rather than re-habitation, raising the question of the respect of the island and of its possible inhabitants. Quite recently, some teenagers have sprayed a lot of graffiti on the historical buildings, but another sign of violence is also a new gate, put here just the day before – an answer of sorts to the graffiti? – that blocks the main access to the island, which is actually public, owned by the Italian State…

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: Social and political issues concerning a place like the island of Sant’Andrea are grounded in sensitive topics of environmental philosophy. In this respect, I would like to propose two more quotes, in order to enhance a critical attitude towards “repair” that is often applied to abandoned or ruined spaces and that, like the notion of “protection”, is often taken for granted.
Despite the distinction between the repair-with-remedy – an attitude that is compatible with irresponsible continuation of global destruction and exploitation – and the repair-with-compensation concepts, Rosetta S. Elkin (Landscapes of Retreat, 2022) takes her distance from any form of repair in terms of restoring of "building back better". Analysing the responsive attitudes towards landscape catastrophes, she favours Isabelle Stengers’ notion of "paying attention" and her own’s notion of "adaptive retreat": «To value retreat as an amendatory practice, it is first necessary to understand what retreat is not. It is not nostalgia for a prior condition, and it is not a return to a previous ecological state. Retreat is not leaving in defeat, nor is it giving up hope. Instead, acknowledging retreat creates hope by giving up our false assumptions of human mastery over the environment. Giving up on mastery is not abandoning our relationships to land or place but reinforcing relations by redefining them anew. […] To acknowledge risk is to recognize our relation to it. Perhaps adaptation is, at best, a way of paying attention to risk as an ally; that is, a compassionate acceptance of the itinerant, living environment.»
Adaptive retreat as paying attention to the environment (of catastrophe) echoes the emancipatory movement that Marion Waller (Artefacts naturels, 2016) sees from restoration to rehabitation.

Pamela Breda: Walking through Sant’Andrea as a form of rehabitation echoes the film’s contemplative attitude, transforming the island into a living cinema where every step reveals new insights. The contemplative attitude fostered by the film translates into a profound engagement with the island, where each vista and ruin become a point of reflection on the past, present, and future. Here, the imaginaries of the future can be envisioned not as fixed outcomes, but as fluid possibilities shaped by the interactions between human and more-than-human actors. The island’s diverse flora and fauna, its shifting tides and changing skies invite a contemplation of life beyond human narratives.

Fabienne Liptay: If we take the more-than-human perspective seriously, we will have to consult the island on our questions. Cosa ne dice Sant’Andrea? What does Sant’Andrea have to say about it? What proposal would the abandoned island – the ruins, the plants, the flowers, the water, the insects (the mosquitoes!), maybe also the spirits inhabiting it – make if it could participate in “Reinventing Cities”, the global competition for sustainable and resilient urban projects that invites submissions for Sant’Andrea? This is a question that Marisol de la Cadena explored in regard to the Andean worlds in her book Earth-Beings, in which she considers the (impossible) participation of the environment in multispecies politics. In the legal system, only humans are granted the status of legal personhood, while more-than-human beings, including islands or lagoons, are considered as property or regulated by the laws of property. There are exceptions, like the ancestral waters of the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the lagoon of the Mar Menor in the Iberian Peninsula. Inspired by these negotiations of the boundaries between human and more-than-human, it is possible to reimagine the Venice lagoon as a pluriverse, as a space in which «heterogenous worldings [are] coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity» (de la Cadena).

Pamela Breda: The concept of “nebula”, a space of potential and indeterminacy, finds a fitting parallel in Sant’Andrea. Sant’Andrea becomes a dynamic extension of the film, a place where the interplay of history, environment, human and more-than-human presence can be viscerally felt and contemplated. The island, with its shifting boundaries and rich historical layers, encapsulates this idea of a nebulous, ever-evolving space.

Alice Jasmine Crippa: The concern around the destiny of the island of Sant’Andrea is palpable during our walk. Giorgio’s film instead portrays architecture living an afterlife (or simply a different life) in more neutral, imaginative terms. It makes me wonder if structured imagination could be a way to reinhabit places without forcing them into any new fixed shape. 
I now wonder if critical confabulation could be a way to “listen” to what a place has to say, allowing many voices to uncover parts of its identity.
I also wonder if a period of speculative play should be deemed necessary before granting anyone the right to change how a public place can be used, owned, or manipulated.
The walk to Sant’Andrea helps me realize how Giorgio’s work channels the voice of the Ospedaletto in a powerful, yet personal way. What could a collective imaginative process in support and defense of Sant’Andrea island look like?

Giuseppe Di Salvatore: Should we read the genius loci of Sant’Andrea in terms of “phantasma loci”? The phantoms of the island – both the historical ones and the current ones – will bring with them the necessity of an imaginary approach to the island, so paving the way to the filmic experience haunting the reality of the island. This simultaneously filmic and phantomatic line, by the way, is well represented in the exhibition in the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, at least with the two filmic installations by Basir Mahmood (Brown Bodies in an Open Landscape Are Often Migrating) and by Diego Marcon (Fritz). After Penumbra (2022) and Nebula (2024), should the next exhibition of the Fondazione In Between Art Film - in two years - be dedicated to this phantomatic narrative, and be called Fabula?

Ruth Baettig: Learning and unlearning, paying attention, listening: they are emerging as shared better practices from the film experience as expanded into the landscape. I see quite well why both in the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto and on the island of Sant’Andrea the experience of sound is the one that impressed me the most. On one side, the film sonority is immersive but leaves the rhythm of the sheep’s wandering to emerge in an organic way, together with its bleating and the sound of the bells. On the other side, the sound of the island appears more like a white noise from which a series of sound surprises keep us awake, receptive, curious. Both the film and the island are non-self-sufficient cosmoi, whose immersion triggers an alerted, welcoming attitude.

Pamela Breda: As researchers, practitioners, and activists in the fields of cinema, culture, and the arts, we bring a multidisciplinary perspective to this walk. Our work often intersects with the realms of history, ecology, and social justice, informing a holistic approach to place-making through film. We recognize that Venice is not merely a backdrop but a living entity with its own stories and struggles.
Expanded cinema in Venice could also serve as a platform for community engagement and social dialogue. By hosting screenings in public spaces, films can become catalysts for conversation and action, addressing social issues such as tourism, displacement, and economic inequality. This communal viewing experience could foster a shared sense of purpose and belonging, empowering local residents and visitors alike to become active participants in the city’s future.
Architects, urban planners, environmental scientists, and artists can work together to design film experiences that not only entertain but also educate and inspire. These collaborations can lead to innovative approaches to urban planning and environmental rehabitation, experiencing film as a tool for envisioning and enacting change.

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The experimental and participative walk-and-talk – curated by Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich) and Giuseppe Di Salvatore (Filmexplorer) – has been facilitated by Fondazione In Between Art Film and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format. The event is the first of our Enchanting Architecture Expanding Film series, which focuses on expanded cinema specifically in terms of “film enchanting architecture”.

With this event we achieve two objectives: to create a network of motivated cultural actors around the intersection of film, architecture and landscape, and to trigger a self-generative development of a shared discussion on said intersections. The output of our first discussion now appears to be focused on the topics of responsive reception, listening, and sound experience as critical and imaginative forms of collective rehabitation. This will provide a guideline for the next discussion.

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Biref information about the contributors of the text:

Giorgio Andreotta Calò creates works that cross boundaries between sculpture, actions and direct architectural intervention. Calò’s research revolves around an intense crossover of dimensions developed through a process of withdrawing fragments from reality and the re-appropriation of architecture, landscape and his own history. He is based in Venice and Amsterdam.

Ruth Baettig is a visual artist working with several media, whose practice involves performative interventions in public space. Co-founder of Filmexplorer, she lives in Basel and Lucerne.

Pamela Breda is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living in Vienna. She holds a PhD in Visual Arts from Kingston University (UK) and is currently senior postdoc at Angewandte University (Vienna).

Alice Jasmine Crippa is a cultural producer, experience facilitator, futurist, runner, and movement researcher who works at the intersection of design, mindset innovation, body thinking, and creativity in service of long-term societal changes.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore, a former philosophy scholar, is currently film and art critic, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Filmexplorer. He lives in Basel and Lucerne.

Ilaria Grippa is a PhD student in history of the arts at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca'Foscari University in Venice. Her research focuses on the reconstruction of the archaeological enterprise of recovering the Nemi Ships through film, iconographic and documentary materials preserved in various archives throughout Italy. 

Fabienne Liptay is a professor of film studies at the University of Zurich and director of the research project “Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She lives in Zurich and Venice.

Giovanni Giacomo Paolin is is an independent curator and producer based in Venice, where he founded the project space Panorama in 2023. His practice revolves around exhibition-making as a responsive collective organic endeavour, finding ways to nurture relations and look after his proximate surroundings. He works for several cultural institutions, among which the Fondazione In Between Art Film.

Noemi Quagliati, an art and photo historian, is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she is developing the project “Bird's-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon. Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem”.

Paolo Rosso is an independent curator and producer based in Venice, Italy. He is the initiator and director of MICROCLIMA, founded in 2011 at the Greenhouse of the Biennale Gardens in Venice, and (together with Edoardo Aruta) of Cinema Galleggiante – Floating Cinema in Venice. Paolo has also started three research projects: the Guwahati Research Program (Assam, India), Los Caminos del Cafè (Santiago de Cuba), and in 2015 the cultural projects RedHero (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia).

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We warmly thank Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Paolo Rosso for guiding us through the island of Sant’Andrea, Samuele Cherubini for the photographic contribution, and the further participants of the walk-and-talk: Franco Basaglia (filmmaker) Matilde Cadenti (Spazio Berlendis, Marignana Arte), Miriam De Rosa (Ca' Foscari University of Venice), Rachele Giudici Legittimo (Pro Helvetia Venice), Niccolò Moronato (artist) and Giulia Morucchio (cultural producer). We also thank Leonardo Bigazzi, Bianca Stoppani and Giovanni Giacomo Paolin (Fondazione In Between Art Film) for facilitating the event, Fabio Cavalletto (Cooperativa Sestante di Venezia) for the wise boat transportation, and Mattia and Jacopo (Bar Caranto, Venice) for the exceptional catering.