435 Ponti e qualche scorciatoia
3 Easy Pieces #2
May 7–November 25, 2019
Curated by Silvia Guerra
Children playing “Three Easy Pieces” by Stravinksy
May 7, 7–7:20pm
Conducted by Massimo Bisson
Chiesa di San Rocco, Campo San Rocco, 30125, Venice
Children playing “Three Easy Pieces” by Stravinksy
May 8, 5–5:20pm
Conducted by Massimo Bisson
Chiesa di San Rocco, Campo San Rocco, 30125, Venice
Lecture by David Horvitz
May 8, 7–8:30pm
Lecture of “How to Shoplift Books,” Publication Studio, 2014
Libreria MarcoPolo – S. Margherita, Dorsoduro 2899, Venice
Children playing “Three Easy Pieces” by Stravinksy
May 9, 5–5:20pm
Conducted by Massimo Bisson
Chiesa di San Rocco, Campo San Rocco, 30125, Venice
435 Ponti e qualche scorciatoia is a work by David Horvitz, a poet and artist living in Los Angeles. This project is conceived in close collaboration with Venetians, local institutions, craftspeople, residents and child musicians.
The entire city of Venice is imagined as the site of the exhibition, where things happen, disappear and reappear… The project is a wandering through the city, sometimes flooded in acqua alta, where only the bridges connecting the islands allow the city to be walkable. Wandering is an unwritten manifesto on slowness.
It is a desired program, dreamed of, different from the ‘dérives’ of the Situationists who used walking to shift the immediate experience of the city, to reinvent a subject. Here walking goes beyond its own purpose of arriving at a destination; it is what we use to sketch the form of the city according to our own breath. Keeping the city standing through our own movement.
David Horvitz is an artist who regularly creates maps, whether around a bouquet or a constellation. For the second of the 3 Easy Pieces, he has collected stories of people who have lived in Venice, connected the places they frequented and the impressions they kept from them, and given all of this voice and circulation, transmitting them in his own way, which is that of a conceptual poet who with two words, Tu (you) and Nebbia (fog), transforms us into a fog, ready to envelop the Serenissima.
Since the birth of Venice, time has been measured in a different way: day started at sunset, the first hour of the day was the first hour after sundown. Today most of the hands on the city’s mechanical clocks no longer work but time can still be measured by the dilated pupils of cats’ eyes. A practice once used by Japanese ninja, or so David tells me.
How much time do you need to walk its 435 bridges? How many shortcuts can you take? Have you ever tasted a gelato made from the Adriatic Sea?
David Horvitz has participated in numerous exhibitions in venues such as: La Criée, Centre d’Art Contemporain,Rennes (2019); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); HangarBicocca, Milan (2017); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2016);MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, (2016); NOMAS Foundation,Rome (2016); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016); Mambo Bologna, Bologna (2015);Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2015) and New Museum, New York (2014). He is featured in the group exhibition snap+share: transmittingphotographs from mail art to social networks, at SFMOMA in 2019.
–Silvia Guerra
435 Ponti e qualche scorciatoia is part two of the 3 Easy Pieces project. The title of this project is a discreet homage to Stravinsky: 3 Easy Pieces is a piano duet that teaches children to play with four hands and was composed in 1915 just after The Rite of Spring shocked the music world. A series of simple and accessible projects in public spaces, mostly performances, that can be appreciated by everyone, specifically a large and anonymous public.
Lab’Bel, the Artistic Laboratory of the Bel Group, was formed in 2010 out of the latter’s keen desire and policy to support contemporary art.
Complete schedule and more locations to be precised on Lab’Bel’s website.
The project will be photographed by Ernst van Deursen
