The Dreamer

Starting 5 May at the Cinema Querini Stampalia: a unique multi-screen cinema showing an anthology film. The fanciful quality of four distinct stories will act as a daydream engaging the public as if they were the directors and editors of another, new film, in which emerge not only unconscious psychological processes but also experiences in a realm where reality and imagination merge.

The device challenges the concepts of unity, continuity and totality of the artwork, examining the tension between multiplicity and synopsis and the shifting of interwoven thematic fragments. In a workshop-like environment, the episodes bring kaleidoscopic incisiveness to an experience of reality, undermining the idea of plot and linear time, and fostering a multifaceted vision of reality in which each episode and even each frame is an experiment in life, a small thought-image.

It offers a view through the lens of Venetian glass, shaped by the breath, the movement of the body and the precision of a watchful eye.Our episodic film is an open, fragmentary and polyphonic form that moves through time and space rendering, set by set, the complexity of reality on stage.

Our emancipated spectator will be able to grasp this tribute to fiction and recognise the power and the logic of mythical rationality, which is not the counterpart to the documentary and, as Jacques Ranciere says: “does not consist in telling stories but in establishing new relationships between words and visible forms, between speech and writing, between a here and an elsewhere, between a once upon a time and a now”.

In the rooms of his home, draped in the precious fabrics of Bevilacqua, Fortuny and Rubelli, is the self-confessed visionary and protagonist of The Dreamer, Count Giovanni Querini. The museum houses over 170 works including The Sibyls by an anonymous Venetian artist, Scenes of Venetian Life by Gabriel Bella, the series by Pietro Longhi, and masterpieces such as The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple by Giovanni Bellini, Saint Sebastian by Luca Giordano, the portraits and the Madonna and Child by Palma il Vecchio. The Count’s cinematic and dreamlike journey is interwoven with the works of six contemporary artists: Giusy Calia’s Oracles, Silvia Giambrone’s Specchi, Emanuele Becheri’s watercolours, Daniela De Lorenzo’s unbreakable dream, Davide Rivalta’s horse, and Chiara Bettazzi’s installations, which add lustre to the historical present—not merely chronological time, but a time in the making, unfolding now while retaining within itself the stratification of the past, where what has been continues to vibrate, illuminating the future.

In the spaces of the Cinema Querini Stampalia, simultaneous “screenings” take the audience on an astro-terrestrial journey amongst monoliths of this and other worlds with Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a planetary code, Nigel Cooke literally darting through the Bad Habits of painting, and finally, perhaps, everything moving and harmonising to the notes of an imaginary soundtrack to be composed with The Invisible Chord. Hans Hartung and Music. Whether we are all inside everyone’s dream, or merely inside someone else’s dream, we are certainly inside the Querini Foundation, the movie theatre you would never expect—a unique cinematic architecture with Scarpa, Botta and De Lucchi within a 16th-century palazzo.

Let us think of our journey to Venice as a montage of diachronic, synchronic and achronic times: a fragment of time that peels away and sticks to others in our memory, as we cross the physical and emotional space where inner utopias, symbolic, material and intangible universes, inhabit the imagination. Each room is an episode; we are the directors who dictate its rhythm and duration, and the exhibitions go beyond the mise en scène, projecting the story of our gaze.

Cristiana Collu
Director of Fondazione Querini Stampalia