There are artworks and installations at the 58th International Art Exhibition (until 24th November) in Venice that somehow seem to have a link with the current situation of emergency in the city, that in the last few days had to deal with a series of devastating floods.
The intervention of Portuguese-born artist Marco Godinho for the Luxembourg Pavilion focuses for example on the ambivalent relationship that mankind entertains with the sea.
A constant fascination for all of us, the sea has always been a territory for real-life adventures and exploratory journeys, a place of legends and a fantastically epic space that still hides from us unexplored depths.
Yet in the last few years the sea has become synonymous with tragedy: think for example about the Mediterranean Sea that turned into a grave for all those migrants who didn't manage to cross it.
A nomadic explorer of geographical, political and philosophical borders, Godinho invites visitors to contemplate in his "Written by Water" installation a vast landscape of paper notebooks that were immersed in the water in different locations around the Mediterranean Sea (Godinho started the project in 2013).
The pages are crumpled and ruined, so they can't be used to take notes, but the artist employs the notebooks as symbols.
They represent indeed stories written by millions of people and show that we are part of a vast flux of collective fates.
The notebooks carry people's stories and the sea in perpetual motion lulls their thoughts and memories, cherishes the tales of millions of invisible souls, and, at times, sadly and fatally rewrites their destinies in unforeseeable and tragic ways.
