In our digital times postage stamps may be deemed rather passé as we all prefer sending emails and quick messages via technological devices. Yet stamps still manage to fascinate us as they represent geography and history, while also being tiny travelling capsules of art and beauty.
It was only natural therefore for Italian artist Elisabetta Di Maggio to turn them into the main material for her installation at Venice's T Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Calle del Fontego dei Tedeschi, Ponte di Rialto).
The lifestyle department store features on its fourth floor a vast space dubbed the "Event Pavilion" dedicated to free exhibitions of contemporary art.
Curated by Chiara Bertola, "Greetings from Venice" (until November 25), is a site-specific installation tackling themes such as the flow of time, the geography of places and people and the value of memory.
For this new work Di Maggio studied the Byzantine patterns of the floor of St. Mark's Basilica and of the main Venetian palazzi, paying attention to their architecturally perfect geometries.
She then proceeded to recreate them inside the Event Pavilion employing one hundred thousand used postage stamps from all over the world.
Images showing the background research for the project are particularly intriguing, but also the photographs taken when Di Maggio installed the mosaics in collaboration with her team of students from the Marco Polo High School in Venice who acted like a sort of Medieval workshop.
The artist went through a painstakingly slow and long process dividing the stamps by origin and colours and then arranging them into maps.
A transparent glass structure allows visitors to walk on the intricate geometries created by the postage stamps: the effect is visually striking since, from far away, the installation looks like a mosaic floor made with tiny tiles; close up you can instead discover flowers and butterflies, kings and queens, planes and spaceships, animals and fish, musical instruments and religious paintings portraying the Madonna and Child.
The installation has some great historical connections with the building: located at the foot of the Rialto Bridge and built in 1228, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was a trading post for German merchants.
Functioning as a palace, a warehouse, market and living quarters, the Fondaco was therefore a lively and safe place where German merchants could keep their goods bought locally or arriving from Nuremberg, Judenburg and Augsburg.
Rebuilt between 1505 and 1508 after its destruction in a fire, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi remained a symbol of the mercantile power of Venice, an important platform for economic trade and a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures until 1797, the year that marks the fall of the Venetian Republic.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the building was turned into the offices of customs control and eventually became the Central Post Office (1930-2007).
In 2008 Benetton bought the building and launched a controversial restoration project, entrusting it to Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his studio OMA. The palace reopened to the public two years ago as the T Fondaco dei Tedeschi (operated by DFS Group).
Considering the history of the building, the stamp mosaics could be interpreted as paper ruins, as an ephemeral and fake archaeological discovery that actually unveils to visitors the various roles the buildings had throughout the centuries, revealing at the same time Di Maggio's techniques and favourite themes.
In her artworks Di Maggio often used surgical scalpels to cut surfaces and discover the dimensions behind them, working as an archaeologist. "I started with sheets of tracing paper and now work on large or small leaves, soaps, porcelain and other surfaces, including building plaster," Di Maggio explains about her technique. "I spend hours cutting these materials into sections and the result are works that share a common theme: the shapes nature assumes in its spread and organization."
The mosaic tiles at the Fondaco may be hiding other stories as well: the more you look at the stamps, the more you think about travelling (as stated above, Di Maggio employed used stamps for her installation), communication networks, information transmission and the time it took in the past to reach out to someone and the time it takes nowadays to spread real or fake pieces of information or transmit and share data. In a nutshell, there is more than meets the eye behind these tapestries of humble stamps.
Image credits for this post
1 - 2 Elisabetta Di Maggio's "Greetings from Venice" installation, ph. Matteo De Fina
3 - 6 Background research for Elisabetta Di Maggio's "Greetings from Venice" installation, ph. Matteo De Fina
7 - 12 Work-in-progress stages of the Elisabetta Di Maggio's "Greetings from Venice" installation, ph. Francesco Allegretto
13 - 17 Installation of Elisabetta Di Maggio's "Greetings from Venice", ph. Matteo De Fina
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