“To be sure, everybody has designs on her, on this city. […] The goal of all that is one: rape.”1 With these blunt words, the poet, Joseph Brodsky, drew attention to the predation upon, and humiliation of, Venice; dual concerns he observed during his frequent sojourns in the city. His telling words prophetically foreshadow the current art installation by Andrea Morucchio, The Rape of Venice; an exhibition that seeks to ward off the complete disappearance of Venice. What is more effective than a total, multi-sensorial, and multimedia installation – that makes the risk of loosing Venice a fact that involves all the senses – than to put the viewer in front of, and inside, this impending threat? The “total installation” was an artistic genre theorised and practised by Ilya Kabakov in the early 1990s as the natural prosecution of the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk “which was dreamt about in the beginning of the century,”2 a concept embraced by Richard Wagner. In trying to express the utopian potential of an artwork, the artist resorts to techniques from the past: the total installation is generated from a collective sorrow, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the possibility of Real Socialism, and therefore, by extension, the collapse of one of the great utopian ideals of the twentieth century. 1 — Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1992 (ed. cit. Azbooka Publishing House, St. Petersburg, 2008, p. 80). 2 — Ilya Kabakov, On the total installation, published by Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 1995, p. 247.
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