Venetian Bind
Opposite: Installation view of the exhibition at the Deakin University Art
Venetian Bind
Deakin University Art Gallery
18 June – 8 August 2025
An ambitious research project developed by Deakin University’s Associate Professor Cameron Bishop and Professor David Cross. It was created for the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Project participants
Group 1
Dean De Landre, Hayley Elliot-Ryan, Simon Grennan
Group 2
Kate Hunter, Katie Lee, Luigi Vescio, Annette Wagner
Group 3
Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Emily Potter, Katy Morrison
Group 4
Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop, Sean Loughrey
Group 5
Merophie Carr, Luke Heemsbergen, Stephen Hennessy, Anne Scott Wilson
Group 6
Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter
This project was developed in conjunction with the Public Exchange Bureau and is proudly hosted by Deakin University Art Gallery. Catalogue production supported by the School of Communication and Creative Arts and Deakin University Art Gallery.
Gallery
Photo by Polo Jimenez
Foreword
I’m delighted to introduce this ambitious project, developed in partnership with the European Cultural Centre as part of the Venice Biennale. It exemplifies the increasingly fluid and collaborative nature of contemporary artistic research in challenging and inventive ways. Bringing together 22 Deakin University researchers, PhD candidates, and an artist fellow supported by the City of Wyndham’s mentorship programme, the initiative was curated by Cameron Bishop and David Cross—figures well known for interrogating the boundaries between art, public space, and critical pedagogy.
Structured into six interdisciplinary teams, each incorporating a Higher Degree by Research candidate, the project invited participants to respond to curatorial provocations through creative experimentation in situ. This process unfolded over six months in Venice, with each group producing works that reflect not only the specificities of place, but the ongoing dialogues around practice-led research and the politics of art-making today.
As a continuation of the 2019 Venetian Blind project, the initiative underscores Deakin University’s commitment to fostering practice-led inquiry and international collaboration, with invaluable support from the DVCR and DVIP (David Halliwell and Matthew Clarke). The culmination of this endeavour, now exhibited at Deakin University Art Gallery, offers audiences a compelling insight into the evolving methodologies of artistic research within a global context.
Professor Simon Tormey
Executive Dean, Arts and Education, Deakin University
Deakin University Art Gallery is proud to be the host of Venetian Bind. The second iteration of the original project Venetian Blind shown at Deakin University Art Gallery in 2019.
As we celebrate the University’s 50th anniversary throughout 2025, it is fitting we host an exhibition capturing key elements of this ambitious research project celebrating creative research and developed by Deakin University for the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the Venice Biennale. Featuring the creation, in 2024, of six interconnected artworks by teams of Deakin researchers, PhD candidates and invited artist from Wyndham City, this project has been elegantly re-presented at the Deakin University Art Gallery.
Congratulations and thanks to all 22 participants and to the project curators and instigators Professor David Cross and Associate Professor Cameron Bishop on the exhibition and for delivering such a complex and inspiring project. Thank you also to Faculty staff, Executive Dean, Professor Simon Tormey and in particular Head of School, Communication and Creative Arts, Meghan Kelly, for the School’s support of this catalogue and for her wonderful design work on the exhibition banners.
I would also like to acknowledge the technical team in the School of Communication and Creative Arts in particular Thomas Salisbury, Matthew Skarajew, Mark Lasky-Davison and Ruben De Franceschi for their technical assistance. Thanks also to the gallery technician Oliver Piperato for his dedicated work.
I invite you to reflect on the beauty and challenges facing Venice through the pages of this catalogue and this immersive exhibition.
Leanne Willis
Senior Manager, Art Collection and Galleries, Deakin University
Introduction
The partnership between Deakin University and Wyndham City is a powerful example of how local government and tertiary institutions can work together to build a thriving creative ecology—one that supports not just significant projects, but people. The mentorship developed for a Wyndham-based artist to take part in Venetian Bind is an initiative we are immensely proud to have brokered, supported, and invested in. The impact of this collaboration—particularly the mentoring, the structured artistic research, and the active participation in a global exchange—has resulted in a genuine pathway for the participating artist, FOOT.
The unusual but impressive trajectory of an artist from Werribee to Venice, as part of a major international initiative led by Deakin in partnership with the European Cultural Centre, is a bold example of what is possible. It highlights the emerging methods for local government to develop creative ecologies that are responsive to contemporary Australia, particularly in the growing urban fringe.
I extend my sincere thanks and commendation to Professor David Cross and Associate Professor Cameron Bishop, as well as the Deakin researchers and PhD candidates who supported the mentee in responding onsite to this curatorial provocation. Past collaborations between Deakin and Wyndham have delivered deeply relevant and meaningful creative experiences and commissions outside traditional cultural centres. The future possibilities of this collaboration continues to have strong strategic alignment for Wyndham City and one the creative staff at Wyndham are excited to continue exploring.
Tegan Lang Coordinator Arts, Culture & Events, Wyndham City
A Conspiratorial Bind
Cameron Bishop and David Cross
Concurrent with the celebrated spectacle of the Venice Biennale, the Venetian Bind project, which unfolded across Venice over 2024, differed from the usual fare served up at one of the world’s great art events. With a panel, both internal and external to Deakin University, we as the curators selected 22 artists, separating them into six teams (working across a variety of disciplines) to make site-responsive public artworks across Venice and the lagoon. Each group of three or four had the unique opportunity to work in situ at staged intervals over the six months of the exhibition at the European Cultural Centre (ECC), and were charged with the responsibility of making a video and an object in only five short days. This initiative followed on from the 2019 Venetian Blind project (note the additional ‘l’) which shared a similarly situated research approach. With the goal of producing iterative, cumulative artworks, the project deployed a variety of novel methods in subtle, activist and collaborative ways, and in public spaces, to explore ideas around the commons, public health and climate adaptation.
Venetian Bind is, at its heart, a research project, built on collaboration of all kinds, but principally it investigates how researchers (emerging and established) can collectively nurture new knowledge and innovative ways of making art in the academy. Unlike the biennale event it is connected to at the ECC, Venetian Bind distinguishes itself not through its gallery or pavilion context, but through its place-responsiveness and single-minded focus on negotiating the city of Venice. This ancient jewel of a city in the North Adriatic is known for many things, not least its material and temporal constraints as an aquatic metropolis. Venetian Bind pressed into the challenge of how creative arts methodologies can engage productively and directly with the environmental and socio-cultural challenges confronting Venice – a city at the frontline of climate change and its implications.
Introducing the project to local audiences in Melbourne courtesy of this exhibition at Deakin University Art Gallery, we begin this articulation of Venetian Bind by offering up a series of potentially irresolvable tensions in the making (and then re-making) of this exhibition. The first, we contend, is a dissonance between the efficacy of place-responsive art-work made in and profoundly shaped by a unique engagement with local contexts, people, stories and environmental particularities- and gallery-based practices in contemporary art, that ordinarily could be seen to be indifferent to the particularities of where art is exhibited. As curators, we are especially interested in the uniqueness of the public realm, devising public art projects in sites often overlooked or considered peripheral to the usual political, or economic business of the city. In doing so, we ground ourselves in our work as co-conspirators, following Harney and Desideri’s far reaching 2013 essay on curatorial practice, A Conspiracy without a Plot. In examining the idea of ‘the undercommons’, as a critical ‘practice of space and time that does not conform to the space and time of sovereign, self-possessed individuals or the states they plot’, this work seeks to understand how our very notion of ‘publicness’ can be remade.i
Following Bifo Berardi’s contention that we have shifted in the age of semio-captalism from conjunction to connection as the dominant mode of social interaction, how might public art projects such as Venetian Bind employ, in Berardi’s words, ‘sensibility as the faculty which makes it possible to find the path which does not exist, the link between things that have no intrinsic or logical implication’.ii Berardi laments that our easy communications and ability to translate across languages and territories, to navigate via Google Maps, does not enhance our experience of the world and each other, but rather diminishes it to ever shallower locks (in the boating sense) through which we make sense of each other and the spaces we inhabit. We, as curators, like to think that we can activate public spaces through Jacques Ranciêre’s idea that art and politics, together, have the capacity to disrupt or redistribute the sensible (the given, the perceptible, and the doable), in any given territory.iii For this project, Venice is brought to life by a group of artists unafraid to upset conventional responses to public places – and the events and characters that they have played host to over centuries – all in the name of bringing art, and the themes at play, into being, through myriad forms and modalities. In this way, in the short time each group was together, and proven in the video and remnant objects displayed in the gallery at Deakin, they activated sites across the lagoon in critically informed, performative responses to make sense of what their senses and instincts were telling them.
Claiming Venice’s status as an overlooked or off-Broadway location for art is a stretch, having been a dominant centre for art since the Renaissance. Venice is many things to millions of tourists and a dwindling resident population, but peripheral to discourses on contemporary art it is not. Why then engage with a city that resists the adjective ‘peripheral’ and is always – courtesy of the world’s longest running biennale – swimming in art? Why transport a swag of antipodeans to the northern hemisphere to make art in largely unfamiliar surroundings about things they are often experiencing for the first time?
Part of the answer and a significant part of the project’s focus is that historically Venice has been much more of a place to show art produced elsewhere than operating as an artistic laboratory with a focus on making work that speaks to the idiosyncratic flavours, people and built environment of this utterly unique water city. Venice, to frame it simply, has been utilised more recently as a glorious backdrop for exhibiting art much more than it is a studio for making– a generative source – from which art is produced. While claiming neither insider status nor first-hand local knowledge, our interest in Venice is threefold based on its unique status as a precarious city in the firing line of climate change, its incredible stories and history, and its resilient and transformatory public cultures formed over millennia. The tourist mecca of Venice, the gondolas, giant passenger ships, and clogged streets between San Marco and Rialto have served as scaffolding to construct the city as an ancient Disneyland of forever Instagrammable pictures, obscuring and overwriting its complex cultures, rendering them, if not invisible, then definitely marginal. Perhaps Venice, the city beyond its reductive and narrow tourist framing, is peripheral after all.
In seeking to immerse the artists in this project in the laboratorial milieu that is Venice, we developed a methodology in four parts that sought to mesh experimental art making with the accumulation of new skills, straddling technique, participatory engagement and an understanding of environment and its assorted transitions. Each of the six groups in Venetian Bind were asked to negotiate and consider four modes for creative exploration namely – ritual, encounter, provocation (or bind) and workshop. These four registers of activity offered, we suggest, a composite artistic method whereby the artist can be simultaneously provocateur, collaborator, student and maker of place-responsive experiences. Venice in these terms becomes a dynamic situated system of communities, histories and technologies, rather than operating in its default setting as an exotic backdrop to display artwork and/or as a series of ossified museums.
Curating Public Dissensus in Venice
Venetian Bind (VB) was one of a number of international projects exhibited at the European Cultural Centre’s biennial art program Personal Structures at Palazzo Mora in Venice. Featuring the work of 15 academics, six PhD students from Deakin University and one commissioned artist from Wyndham City, the artists in VB were asked to firstly learn from the city before making a series of material and time-based responses that were placed iteratively, group by group, in the gallery. While one aim of the project was to present innovative, place-responsive artwork to an international audience, more specifically, our aim was to preface the specific conditions for making public art at this time, in this place, from the perspective of a group of university researchers and artists based in the southern hemisphere. The project asks what is at stake to make a series of artworks that speak to the changing face of Venice, its people, climate and distinct cultural formations? We ask how might curatorial framing be configured to create the parameters through which artists can meaningfully respond to a spectrum of issues that impact the city and its future from climate change, to mass tourism, to the de-population of permanent residents? This section unpacks how and why we make this project. We start with a brief overview of our curatorial practice, framed as it is by the co-conspiratorial model that Desideri and Harney proffer in their 2013 speculative and poetic essay, A conspiracy without a plot, iv which has seen us as curators seek out the marginal, the peripheral and the outright strange in the site-responsive projects we have made together. At the same time, it blurs our role as academics in the academy where our roles as researchers/curators/artists are meant to follow distinct plotlines. For an assortment of reasons, this is not how our projects often go, because simply they are so complex and calibrated to things we cannot see and experiences we cannot quite imagine. There are so many variable elements in the bureaucracies, the logistical frames and conceptual mechanisms we deploy that provisionality, contingency and happenstance are always front and centre. As friends, we are complicit in making work that builds capacity for others, which is what a university wants from its putative leaders, but at the same time our dialogical process does not fix us to our offices oncampus, or scheduled meetings on Zoom, but to situated research in the places we make work, as well as to conversations over coffee, lunch and dinner. Indeed, Venetian Bind, was conceived with multiple forces in mind, primarily our imaginations, and their ability to negotiate a variety of project layers and with the contributions and shared creative agencies of many people across several large organisations.
We make projects against common sense if you consider the circumstantial evidence: an increasingly bureaucratic and neo-liberalised compliance culture; public spaces that present multitudes of occupational, health and safety issues; places and contexts that are culturally sensitive for multiple groups; not to mention artists, creatives, bureaucracies ill-equipped to deal with a-priori research and the provocative (and conspiratorial) nature of how we curate among numerous other variables. Whether it be projects conceived in sewage farms, for container and passenger ships, on coastal cliffs, in old military bunkers, in response to controversial issues like the drowning of an Australian prime minister, and in bio-hazardous material at a wastewater treatment plant, we are entranced by sites that could been seen to be resistant or even hostile to artistic engagement. Having brought performance and art events into being in the least likely of places,
we look to disrupt the concept of the controlled milieu, that Josephine Berry talks about in her 2018 book, Art And (Bare Life), by taking Jacques Ranciêre’s advice and deliberately constructing dissensus to undo our ordinary phenomenological sensory relations to site, as well as our common sense for it.v
Having scoped out the general, what follows is an explication of the particular, and specifically an overview of how the project unfolded. While seeking to make trouble for certain orthodoxies that have defined the constitution of Venice as a city, we narrow in on the projects to locate how the six teams of artists navigated the city. In doing so we want to establish a theoretical frame for understanding Venice as a kind of stage space into which the groups were asked to collaborate and make work. We use Group 4 (VBG4) who we were there with from June 23-28, 2024, as a primary case study, to envisage Venice as a city under siege from the sea, and at the same time unfold our curatorial techniques in situated circumstances. While explaining the nuances of VBG4’s bind, we further explain how dissensus activates our thinking around our projects while extending it out into the prompts and provocations we activated with other groups.
The Binds
With a focus on water, environment, and sustainability, each team, arriving iteratively at different times across the six months of the exhibition, were asked to respond to a unique “bind” – a series of prompts set across multiple Venetian locations. These experiences, ranging from encounters with local experts to hands-on workshops, sought to foster creativity and collaboration in a compressed time frame where research, experimentation, building collaborative processes and subsequently, art and exhibition making, all took place over five days.
The binds, which could be seen as curated conundrums or challenges to resolve, should be understood as focused provocations, subjects of investigation that are both particular and yet open for artistic response. Considering the limited timescale for which each group was in Venice and to research in situ, the binds might be framed as pragmatic mechanisms by which the methods of place-based art can accommodate the logistical constraints of the project as a whole. When we are encouraged to adopt the methods of slowness, of deep listening and carefully building networks over time, this project could be seen to operate in contra-distinction, an artistic version perhaps of fly in fly out tourism. While aware of the pitfalls of this acceleration of knowledge and experience, Venetian Bind is an attempt to add layers of complexity and value to this temporal compression, an attempt to build meaningful and respectful ways of working artistically that accommodate the necessities of braiding speed with slowness. While there was a focus on creating outcomes with each of the six groups creating both a collective artwork to be displayed at Palazzo Mora, and a three-minute film that forms a component of a cumulative film, crucially, the outcome is no more important or significant than the processes of learning, workshopping, and collaborating. The pedagogical underpinnings of this project are as important as the opportunity to exhibit in conjunction with the Venice Biennale.
Working through place-based research methods in situ offered the researchers, artists and PhD candidates an opportunity to consider the varied ways creative responses might be arrived at and how the city can become a locus (an affective studio) for creative response. To be sure, the bind and its workshops, engagement with locals and the like, was as much an introduction to working in the public sphere as to preface spontaneity, experimentation, dialogue and trust-building in collaborative art making. It was a performative beginning based on timed messaging and events as well as chance, happenstance, improvisation and risk and by no means a fully resolved or thickened negotiation of place. The artists arrived in Venice without a briefing about the scope of what was to transpire and with no predetermined materials. Instead they were guided by a series of written, verbal, performed prompts and encounters delivered by the curators remotely and by a local producer on the ground. Each bind had its own dramaturgy, featuring local experts and performers, who appeared at different times across the week of activities.
Pascal Gielen, in Performing the Common City, outlined a typology of four possible relations between art, city and politics. These are the monumental, the situational, the creative and the common city, and they became a four pointed star for to guide us in this project. Gielen prefaces the importance of the common city as a model to replace the fashionable creative city as popularised by Richard Florida and others.vi Of these frames, it is the situational, the common, and to a lesser extent the monumental, that could be seen as most salient to the Venetian Bind project. In shaping a project that challenges the orthodoxies of art made for pavilions or galleries and not in and for the public realm, VB looks to interrupt this process, seeking dialogue and exchange with overlooked or hidden parts of Venice and its people. In prefacing the situational, a unique set of conditions produced over a week across the city’s breadth, VB invited artists to consider a new awareness of space, inhabitation, and movement, all positioned through the prism of the city’s relationship to water, and more universally, our changing climate.
Venice as Milieu: Past, Present, and Future
In his concept of the milieu, Michel Foucault identifies a space in community formations that organises and regulates the relations of individuals to each other and to their environment.vii This idea offers us an important critical lens through which to examine the modern city, something Josephine Berry has described as ‘theatres of contingency and control.viii From Melbourne, where most of the artists in this project come from, the city was borne of a grid system, of roads stretching north and south, east and west for many kilometres. The rest of the city bloomed from this rigid structure over almost 200 years. To be sure, we are organisms shaped, as Berry suggests in her reading of the milieu, by our affective and ‘reciprocal relationship’ with our ‘environment’.ix Venice is, clearly, different to Melbourne, where its population, and the cultural and political life of the city has been so markedly informed by the life of the sea around it, which rhizomatically shaped it to arrive at a network of canals and calles that have not changed for millenia. For the artists to work in these circumstances, to make work in reciprocal exchange with its elemental and material nature, not to mention the cultural and political histories of the city, is profound.
Before Napoleon accelerated Venice’s transition into a museum with bunk beds (Airbnb), the city was, for centuries, a centre of power, commerce, and culture, contributing significantly to the economic and political structures that have shaped human history. The city’s architecture and the practices it housed reflect centuries of socio-political dynamics and control mechanisms that Foucault would argue are indicative of broader power structures that we might recognise today. So while Venice might be seen as a museum piece, a relic of the past that signifies old power dynamics and exploitative practices, these things are still inherent to capitalism, and have led to contemporary issues like global warming, while also being clearly evident in housing issues such as the Airbnb crisis effecting the city. It is indeed a perversity, that many of those ‘authentic’ Venetians who make a living from its tourist trade, actually live on the mainland.
A city physically removed from the mainland, Venice has long served as a transformative space for its inhabitants and visitors – a place where ordinary rituals, rules, practices and expectations are distended and/or suspended, allowing for unique practices and forms of expression to develop. However, this city is on the brink of ossifying, a museum sliding into the sea, where Gielin’s four fine attributes for the modern city may become moot. Venice not only encapsulates a historical space of wonder and transformation but reflects the precarious balance between preservation and destruction in the Anthropocene era. While we position Venetian Bind as a 21st century pedagogical intervention into Venice, and as a counter to the set-and-forget paradigm of the Biennale, we further present the city as a precarious stage space, to borrow from Foucault again, a heterotopia of sorts, that creates the ‘illusion’ exposing ‘every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory’.x In this way we consciously separate out Venice from our so called ‘real’ sites, from the southern hemisphere cities that condition us, to operate as an other space where peoples’ practices and processes were challenged, extended and potentially, transformed. The photographer has license to become film-maker, the writer to become sculptor, and the painter, a conceptual artist.
While the city is at the centre of the art world every two years, Venice also represents a positive vision for the future as a utopian urban environment where most parts of it are accessible within a 20-minute walk. The concept of the 20-minute city of course aligns with contemporary urban planning ideals that prioritise sustainability, accessibility, and quality of life. Venice’s intricate network of canals and calles, is genuinely a model for eco-friendly, energy efficient, healthy living, having adapted its shape to the vicissitudes of the lagoon. However, this future vision is threatened by the legacy and hubris of the very power structures Venice once epitomised and perpetuated. Runaway global warming, driven by historical and ongoing industrial and economic practices, poses a dire threat to the Serinissima, making it one of the first cities likely to suffer the catastrophic impacts of climate change, as sea levels inexorably rise. No matter how we dress it up, 22 people travelled to Venice to make work, and as as milieu, or heterotopia, we ultimately co-conspired to present the six group of artists with an opportunity to respond to the social, environmental, political and playful aspects of the city. The following section outlines how we drill into one of the projects (no.4) to further explain the novel aspects and motivations of the curatorial framing, in both theoretical and practical terms.
Ritual and Dissensus for a Species at the Crossroads
10:30 am, Tuesday the 25th, June 2024 at Ponte dei Pugni – the Bridge of Fists
To set the scene, a troupe of actors and their director rehearse a script in situ at the Ponte dei Pugni in Dorsuduro, Venice. They rehearse a heated dispute between two people, an engaged couple. The Ponte dei Pugni or Bridge of Fists, once the battleground for Venetian clans, now hosts a modern ideological clash. An eco-warrior and her fiancé, a latter-day libertarian, uncover some uncomfortable truths about each other as they rehearse their vows on the Bridge of Fists. They enact a form of public dissensus, a performance triggered by the emergence of the Venetian Bind Group 4 (VBG4) who encounter the scene, seemingly by chance.
Eco-warrior fiancé (gesturing at the algae)
“Look at the algae, a slimey green testament to centuries of neglect. Venice is sinking my love, dragged down by the weight of our collective indifference. Acqua alta events are becoming more frequent, more severe. This isn’t just the weather. We’re sliding into the sea, weighed down by tourists, souvenirs, and the detritus of bad contemporary art”.
Climate change denier fiancé (with a knowing smirk)
“You sound like an alarmist my dearest, or shall I call you Greta. Global warming, climate change? It’s all cyclical, just like the biennale, rolling in every second year with the cognoscenti and hypocritical theorists – the only thing we’re in danger of being flooded by are the buzzwords and bullshit”.
This rehearsed reading ends with the bride throwing her engagement ring into the canal, a gesture that signifies the end of the symbolic union, but also draws attention to a more important macro bond between the human and the elemental. The marriage to the sea ceremony symbolised the union between the Serinissima Republic and Venice’s surrounding seas and lagoons, a tradition that began almost 1000 years ago. Each year, the Doge, from 1177 to 1797, sought to marry the sea in an effort to subjugate it, to bring it under the city’s control for it to bestow its bounty and its calm. Once a year, on Ascension Day, from his throne on the Bucentauro, he would lead a fleet of boats to the channel between the lagoon and the Adriatic, and from there throw a gold ring into the water cementing the bond, and the city’s ultimate dominion over the sea. At the Ponte dei Pugni, in the rehearsed reading, we detourned this gesture to claim it as an original act of
dissensus, where the elemental sheers across the symbolic to disrupt the orderly flow of the senses, in this usually serene scene. At the same time, we conjure up the history of the space, a former theatre for physical combat, where rival clans from across Venice would send their young men to literally punch out their grievances for the pleasure of thousands of spectators. In our publicly rehearsed reading, the protagonists threw the ring into the canal, which followed the descent of the vanquished fighter. They did not find the ring, just as the sea never returned the Doge’s gold one, and it is fair to say, the evidence suggests, that the sea was never tamed.
In this scene, we are calling on the forces of history and ritual to replay and enact a kind of dissensus, where the senses and sense-making are scrambled. Jacques Ranciêre suggests that dissensus is not only a clash between differing interests or opinions, but a deeper manifestation of a rupture within the very fabric of what is perceived as sensible; ‘a division inserted in common sense: a dispute over what is given and about the frame in which we see something as given’.xi In this case the forces of sensibility are multi-valent as history and ritual collide with the elemental, where the performative is transfigured by a political debate drawing on the seemingly irreconcilable differences manifesting in a lovers’ tiff made public. This staged event highlights and exploits the gaps within the sensible and conventional world of that scene, where the lines of demarcation between performance, rehearsal, participation, performer, audience and everyday-citizen / tourist-making-their-way-from-A-to-B become blurred. This slice of Venice becomes a temporary stage space, a heterotopia, in which a variety of forces morph into a denouement swallowed by what could be described as the sublime elemental. In its portmanteau melding of dissonance and consensus, dissensus ‘expresses how amorphousness and meaning combine into the very motor of politics and art’.xii We do this not to seek consensus in a conventional theatre of politics, not to invite a reciprocity between the human and non-human, and not to wrap ourselves in the weeds of entanglement with the new-materialists, however tempting, but to invite political discourse into otherwise conventional scenes in Venice, where in the stage space of a performed provocation and artwork, the real concerns of the world outside of the spectacular fantasy space of Venice might flood back into the tourists’, the artists’ and even Venetian residents’ and workers’ consciousnesses, if only for a short time.
From this point on after the performance, a presentation of rings and a carefully chosen gondola ride, we did not know what the group would make. As with the experience of the proceeding three groups, where the prompts emerged in different forms of ritual, encounter, workshop and bind, paradigmatic moments might be identified for each group in a spectrum of strikingly diverse scenarios. A cursory list includes when the local academic and artist Giorgio Benotto emerged from the stairs to the canal at the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo to talk about the creeping algae on the walls to VB Group 1, measuring its creep against paintings by Venetian legends Bellotto and Canaletto; or when Group 2 were asked to catch the vaporetto to Sant Erasmo, but missed it, so our producer organised a private boat ride to tour Venice’s food bowl; for Group 3, it may have been the printing workshop at Veneziastampa, or the stack of blank paper found in the birdcage on the silent island of San Servolo; group 4 see above; and in Group 5’s case, the kayak tour giving way to Borges’ Elegy delivered by a Minotaurian Stephen Hennessy at the back of the Libreria Acqua Alta; and finally in Group 6’s eventful trudge across the lagoon by boat, bus and legs to the island of Choggia carrying an Esky full of ice, to be told fish could only be bought wholesale –begging and bribes not an option. This later scenario should be put down to curator error, but we contend, it added unexpected and even valuable layers to the group’s artistic scope.
Many of these moments are captured in this catalogue, and with the resilient ego and thick hide a curator must carry, it goes without saying that maybe the moments mentioned above didn’t matter at all to the groups. We might not be as important or clever as we think we are. No doubt there were subtle events that affected the groups in ways only they (collectively and in conspiracy) could articulate, that sparked an idea and material investigation, or collective concentration on a site. There is no doubt the unique dynamics and tensions that played out in the groups fed into the video and material objects, not to mention the (hopefully all-forgiven) good-natured antipathy directed at the curators on the other side of the world, whereby a conscious dissensus may have taken hold in the group and work was perhaps made in-spite of our prompts and provocations. Ultimately, though,
in conjuring these curatorial frames for the groups to work in it allowed us to deeply consider how people might work in conjunction with each other, and their disciplinary proclivities, not in smooth and seamless connected harmony, but in productive dissonance, and ideally, in conspiratorial and collaborative action – the results of which are in the gallery and this catalogue.
Conclusion to a Curatorial Conceit Conceived in Conspiracy
The curator becomes the accomplice when she helps to produce this uncomfortable care, a care that is dangerous, made together but open to anyone and anything, a beautiful care that enlivens attention, heightens sense till sense and meaning coincide. This is a care without responsibility, a care without guarantees, placed in danger.xiii
The final section title reads as trying to be too clever by halves or at least being led by word play. We are aware of ourselves and our hubris in the projects we conjure, but we do it to transform public spaces into dynamic sites of engagement and critique, places where history and culture are duly acknowledged but also extended and distended. We do this while building capacity for artists, and in this case 22 colleagues inside and outside of Deakin University. Simply put this project employs a four-part methodology – ritual, encounter, provocation, and workshop – that comes from our conspiratorial approach to devising projects that place equal emphasis on idea, process, collaboration, contingency, absurdity, fabrication and situation. To envisage ourselves as co-conspirators affords us a counter-position to the hegemonic flow of the institutions, the bureaucracies and vested interests we negotiate with to make them. A social bond, sense of humour, curiosity and resilience gives us a confidence few curators would have on their own. With the creative practitioners we work with, from across the disciplinary spectrum, we like to think of ourselves as accomplices in, and caretakers of, their work, where the four points of the methodology act as buoys on an ocean (or lagoon), guiding and encouraging artists to push the boundaries of their discipline, and drift into others’ disciplines, perhaps into dangerous waters. With the undeniable creep of the algae up the walls of Venice, we’ve got nothing to lose, right?
i Desideri, V. and Harney, S. “A conspiracy without a plot”, in ed. Martinon, Jean-Paul. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p.128
ii Berardi, F. And: Phenomenology of the end, Semiotext(e), Pasadena, 2015, p.12
iii Ranciêre, J. Dissensus, trans. & ed. Corcoran, S. Continuum, London, 2010, p.149
iv Desideri, V. and Harney, S. “A conspiracy without a plot”, in ed. Martinon, Jean-Paul. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 127 - 135
v Ranciêre, J. Dissensus, trans. & ed. Corcoran, Steven, Continuum, London, p.69
vi Gielen, P. “Performing the Common City”, in Bax, S. Gielen, P and Ieven, B (eds) Interrupting the City: Artistic constitutions of the Public Sphere, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2015, pp. 273-296
vii Foucault, M. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p.36
viii Berry, Josephine, Art And (Bare Life), Sternberg Press, London, 2018, p.27
ix Ibid.
x Foucault, M. “Of Other Spaces”, in trans. Miskowiec, J. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité October, 1984
xi Ranciêre, J. Dissensus, trans. & ed. Corcoran, Steven, Continuum, London, p.69
xii Berry, Josephine. Art And (Bare Life), Sternberg Press, London, 2018, p.33
xiii Desideri, Valentina. and Harney, Stefano, “A conspiracy without a plot”, in ed. Martinon, Jean-Paul. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, UK, p.132
Group 1
Dean De Landre, Hayley Elliot-Ryan, Simon Grennan
From the beginning, Team1 were conscious of an ambient and slightly awkward question: how can visiting artists address social and environmental issues when they are also incriminated in those issues? That is: we recognised the inherent paradox of visiting a site to respond to problems caused by over-visitation to that site. For this and no doubt other reasons, VB team 1 seemed to naturally converge upon an essentially absurdist approach to our mission on the lagoon. While we embraced humour and folly, we were never cynical or nihilistic about our singular opportunity to be artistresearchers in Venice. Deep down perhaps, beyond our trained reflexivity, we did believe in the fundamental conceit: that art and artists really could provide solutions.
But while the thought of taking ourselves seriously seemed absurd in the situation, our seriousness about making art was greatly amplified. Our group somehow gelled immediately and we quickly began plotting, drinking caffè, emptying Venice of its Tramezzini supply, and scheming. The work itself was both obsessive and joyful. We were each of us attracted to playing with and against our creative and logistic constraints – and to develop material work that our intensely abbreviated residency clearly wasn’t disposed to. We wanted to forgo a cool and expedient kind conceptualism to make something that risked embarrassment and failure.
Once set to work, which included sculpting, constructing, painting, gilding, sewing, sound and video recording. our experience of Venice possessed a crackling intensity and a shared sense of purpose that was radically unlike being there as a tourist. Each venture outside of our apartmentturned-studio now became a quest, taking us predictably and repeatedly back to the art supply shop, back to tourist tat stores (what Hayley called ‘nonsense’ stores) and assorted high-end fashion retailers. But it also took us to premises seldom frequented by tourist visitors to the lagoon – a hardware store, a second-hand dancewear shop, and other equally precarious businesses that still serviced their ever-dwindling number of permanent residents.
Underwriting all of this experience however is the curatorial structure of Venetian Bind. That structure: part Big Brother, part MI-5, part Dan Brown novel, engenders an uncanniness to the creative project that feeds off Venice’s own De Chirico-like uncanniness. It is a feeling not simply of being deployed as an artist-researcher at large in Venice but rather the feeling of being sent on an important but opaque mission – and of being put to the test ,and curiously, somehow being monitored by our disembodied, and inscrutable curators (always employing intermediaries whenever face to face contact was required). That mission is in turn part of a larger sequence of equally inscrutable missions tasked with interrogating some creative, historical, social, and environmental interaction. However tangentially our team may have responded to its brief in our mash-up of history, fashion, and amphibious pet design, it is the disembodied brief and its mysterious arrival on our ‘doorstep’ that mobilises the whole adventure.
Opposite: Hayley Elliot-Ryan
Photo by Simon Grennan and Dean DeLandre
Artwork Fabrication
Photo by Dean DeLandre and of Hayley Elliot-Ryan
Simon Grennan
Photo by Dean DeLandre and of Hayley Elliot-Ryan
Above, opposite and P 18-19: Process Images
Photos by Dean DeLandre and of Hayley Elliot-Ryan and Simon Grennan
Group
2
Katie Lee, Kate Hunter, Luigi Vescio and Annette Wagner
What is it to make art with your tongue?
‘Lick’ is a work that interrogates the boundaries between consumption and embodied engagement with site. Through a series of performative gestures that question visitors’ relationships to Venice’s contested cultural landscape, we produced a series of live and mediated explorations of learning through licking.
The context-building that the curators established was invaluable to our creative response –establishing opportunities to access less-visited places and connect with local Venetians. These assorted activities and workshops allowed us to foreground lived experience and local knowledge, and the resultant performative elements became grounded in something authentic and beyond the cursory or superficial. Within this framework, we found permission to play, to laugh, to question and to lick with both irreverence and sincerity – transforming these sensory explorations into meaningful engagement with the complexity of Venice.
From these experiences, we developed a creative methodology that simultaneously acknowledged our own desire to know Venice intimately, while critiquing the excesses of tourism and consumption that define much of the city’s identity.
The process of licking Venice, literally and metaphorically, became our way to embody this paradox. The escalation of our ‘licking’ was subtle at first but increasingly transgressive. Beyond the sonic potential of licking, with its distinctive slurps and gulps, we discovered rich performative possibilities in the gestures of tasting and consuming: the intimate close-ups of tongues and lips, the deliberate absurdity of what objects we chose to lick, and the gradual evolution from licking architecture and objects to licking each other’s bodies – all serving as both participation in and commentary on consumption.
Across the course of the week ‘Lick’ morphed into unexpected territory, becoming a reflection on consumerism in its most literal sense. It confronted us with uncomfortable questions about our own positionality – we had approached Venice critically yet found ourselves implicated in the very systems we sought to examine. The city’s transformation through tourism and global art events like the Biennale mirrored our own actions as we ‘consumed’ Venice through our artistic practice. This tension between critique and participation became central to the work: were we mocking the system or operating in it? Licking ultimately served as both methodology and metaphor, embodying our ambivalent entanglement as simultaneous critics and participants in cultural consumption.
In Venice in 2024, ‘Lick’ manifested as a multimedia installation featuring a wax tongue sculpture created by local Venetian artisan Giorgio Benotto Awai, alongside a 4-minute film of performative interactions and an audio composition that visitors could listen to with headphones. Our collaboration with Awai enabled us to redirect resources toward Venice’s artistic community rather than tourist economies, while benefiting from his specialised knowledge of sculptural techniques, and the city itself.
For this iteration at Deakin University Art Gallery in Melbourne, we have transformed the material elements while maintaining the conceptual framework. Due to the forces of entropy, we have replaced the wax tongue which slowly corroded in the Venetian climate, concentrating instead on the original sound component.
The work continues to draw strength from our interdisciplinary collaborative approach, with team members contributing expertise in performance, participatory methodologies, sound design, and visual arts. This convergence of perspectives has enabled us to develop a multisensory experience, inviting audiences to physically engage with elements of the work and their own acts of cultural consumption.
Working within the Venice Biennale context presented both practical and conceptual challenges that ultimately enriched our understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration. A notable example was the negotiation around the work’s title. While the curatorial team initially proposed ‘Feçundita,’ our artistic collective had developed ‘Lick’ - a more direct, sensory, and somewhat irreverent title that we felt better captured the work’s embodied methodology.
This naming tension revealed underlying questions about creative authority and disciplinary expectations within collaborative contexts. Our team’s diverse backgrounds influenced our responses to curatorial intervention - those from theatrical and performative traditions were accustomed to distributed authorship models, while those grounded in visual arts brought expectations of greater autonomy over framing and contextualising their work.
Rather than seeing these tensions as obstacles, we recognised them as productive sites for examining how interdisciplinary practice necessarily destabilises traditional notions of artistic ownership. The negotiation process foregrounded important questions that ultimately strengthened the work and our collaborative methodology namely: How do we balance individual voices within collective creation? Where does artistic authority reside in collaborations that span institutional boundaries? And how might we develop more nuanced models of shared authorship that respect both curatorial frameworks and artistic intentions?
Photo of Tongue by Cameron Bishop.
Sant’Erasmo Boat with Marta. Photo by Kate Hunter, Katie Lee, Luigi Vescio and Annette Wagner.
Above, opposite and P 24-25: Workshop Documentation
Photos by Kate Hunter, Katie Lee, Luigi Vescio and Annette Wagner
Above: Tongue by Georgio Bennetto Awai
Below: Georgio Bennetto Awai in his workshop
Photos by Kate Hunter, Katie Lee, Luigi Vescio and Annette Wagner
Group 3
Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Katy Morrison and Emily Potter
Who is it that is free to roam?
Venice was famously built on the forests of adjacent countries. An estimated 10 million tree trunks hold up the city. To this day, there are swathes of Slovenia that remain bare from this systematic deforestation 500 years ago. It is one of the many places that shadow Venice – a great and gilded city that grew wealthy from its position at the centre of trading routes that straddled and extracted from many parts of the globe. These shadows raise questions about the legacies of empires and remind us that geographies are made by histories. Australia – unlike Slovenia – may be on the other side of the world to Venice, but they are connected by imperialism and the related threads of capitalist modernity that shape these places today.
Given the gift of a workshop with one of the oldest active printing rooms in Venice, we considered what words to print – words that followed our interests and might orient new directions. We decided on a quotation from an essay by Tanganekald, Meintangk, and Bunganditj woman and Professor of Law at the University of South Australia, Irene Watson*: ‘who is it that is free to roam?’. Professor Watson is talking about the legal structures that deny First Nations sovereignty and related rights in Australia, but it is a provocation that moves. Mobility and political agency are radically uneven across the world, and this provocation speaks differently to diverse subjectivities. In the context of modern Venice, facing a pressure point of climate change and untenable tourist volumes, the freedom to roam comes at a great cost – again, a radically unevenly felt one.
Professor Watson’s words guided our future steps. With the next prompt, we were on our way to San Servolo, the location of the official psychiatric asylum of Venice that held inmates between 1725-1978. Here, we were invited to reflect on histories of silenced women, and to create creative responses to this place. The ‘bind’ for us was the parameters of this invitation. The frame of silenced women grated: we were all women who could speak, and were active in doing so, and interested in connections to this place that extended beyond binaries of confinement and freedom. Moreover, it was on San Clemente (visible from San Servolo) that women were confined, and that a female asylum was historically housed. We decided to head to four corners of the island, and there we all sat, thought and wrote. The texts we created engaged with questions of voice, but also questions of place, power, framing, the gaze, movement, orientation, exploitation, climate change, and time.
We read these texts aloud to each other, and Olivia experimented with ‘scoring’ these works; we filmed her dancing on a jetty out on the lagoon. Back in Venice, we wondered about transposing those island sites (the four directions of the compass) onto the main island, evoking the always-shadowed nature of place. The sites on which we mapped out our North, South, East and West were: Campo SM Mater Domini, Campo della Pescaria, Campiello dei Squelini, and Piazzale Galileo. These sites not only represented the compass points, at each of them we found a representation of an animal – a bird at Campo SM Mater Domini, a fish at Campo della Pescaria, a dolphin at Campiello dei Squelini, and a winged lion at Piazzale Galileo. These animals reminded us of the multi-species nature of cities, and the more than human community that inhabits urban space, and also suffers its threats. Olivia re-performed her scored dances at these sites and again we recorded her work. The public were a key presence in these performances, sometimes noticing and reacting to Olivia, and sometimes gliding past, absorbed in their own worlds.
Our video work and hand printed posters are the result of this process. These were brought together through the power of Professor Watson’s open question, and the embodied exploration of this in a place that is inextricably linked to places elsewhere, and consequently to the implications of mobility, relationality, complicity and responsibility.
*Irene Watson, ‘Settled and unsettled Spaces: Are we free to roam?’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 15-32.
Photo of research visit to San Servolo. Photo by Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Katy Morrison and Emily Potter.
Above: Katy Morrison at Print workshop
Opposite: Closeup image of Typography Workshop
Photos by Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Katy Morrison and Emily Potter
Above, opposite and P 32: Typography Workshop
Photos by Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Katy Morrison and Emily Potter
Artist Proofs from Workshop
Photo by Victoria Duckett, Olivia Millard, Katy Morrison and Emily Potter
Group 4
Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop & Sean Loughrey
arte preserva
The message arrived via WhatsApp: “Meet at 4:30pm at Museo Storico Navale Venezia, on the waterfront in Arsenale.”
The air was heavy with humidity as we gathered, sweat-soaked and curious, unsure of what we were stepping into.
We climbed the stairs of the naval museum to Level 1, after being asked/told to find the room with the Bucintoro. There, beside the final model of this famous Venetian ceremonial ship, a museum plaque revealed a layered story of ritual and dominion. Amid lavish gilded surfaces, we uncovered the annual ceremony of marrying the sea as a spectacle of power. A gold ring, blessed and valued at six ducats, was offered by the DOGE and thrown into the lagoon with the words:
“Disposamus te mare in Signum veri perpetuique Dominii.”
(We marry you, oh sea, in token of our true and perpetual dominion.)
Bridge and sea, violence and superstition, conflict and appeasement – these registers still echo through the city. Once, water was conquered. Today, it rises as a force beyond control. The same ritual, now recast, no longer asserts power, but pleads for connection, mercy, and renewal.
Later, another message arrived. We were called to a restaurant in Dorsoduro. There, the waiter curiously referred to us by our names and delivered envelopes. Inside these missives were a protest postcard and a set of gold rings (one for each of us). After dinner and with further instruction, we gathered on the Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), standing on three of the four golden footprints once used to mark historical brawls dating back centuries. Each of us threw our rings into the canal – a new kind of ceremony. Less spectacle, more offering, we were binding ourselves to the water, not as masters, but as witnesses.
The following day brought a surprise: a heated argument between two lovers on the same bridge. Their clash over climate change grew louder and more intense. What seemed like coincidence turned out to be a performance – another provocation staged for our contemplation. Not a fight of fists, but of ideas. A ritual of friction that challenged our comfort and deepened our inquiry.
Throughout the week, we were invited to bring our most radical selves into view. Through a series of workshops and actions, we explored personal and collective connections to water. Dan Koop led us along the canal’s edge through intimate stories. Sean Loughrey offered songs to the water. Tania Blackwell dragged a white veil from the bridge, as if drawing memory from the current. A gondola ride carried us from the open lagoon into quiet canals passing under the Bridge of Sighs, moving through states of vulnerability, calm, and tension.
From these shared provocations, three video works emerged. One followed a turista crossing the Rialto Bridge in a life jacket, a strange and quiet alarm amid the flow of tourists. Another reimagined the DOGE’s ring ceremony with a salvagente, a bright orange, ring shaped, life buoy, flung from the Bridge of Fists in a gesture both playful and political. The third tracked emergency boat lights flickering through dry alleyways, signaling disorientation, urgency, and collapse.
The objects from these performances were not discarded. Instead, they were reassembled alongside other locally sourced objects into a sculptural installation titled ‘arte preserva’ – both precarious and poetic, in the spirit of arte povera, the well-known Italian art movement of the 1960s that utilized so-called ‘poor art’ materials like water, soil and concrete. A life buoy, gilded timber scavenged from a boatyard, salvaged Venetian bricks, spritz liquor bottles, and water taken directly from the canal* – were all stacked in delicate tension on the plinth in Palazzo Mora. Not stable. Not safe, they were a fragile monument to survival, a structure that could go under at any moment. Venice may be sinking, but our gestures persist. Not in grand displays, but in humble, improvised rituals. Not to dominate the sea, but to listen to it and bind us together once again.
*At Deakin Gallery the Venetian bricks have been recontextualised and replaced with academic texts and spritz bottles containing local waters, indicating the art historical pile we draw from and add to and the conceptual flows that connect our practices through this curated experience.
Accademia Bridge from Gondola. Photo by Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop and Sean Loughrey.
Dan Koop and Sean Loughrey Installation Test
Photo by Tania Blackwell
P 40-41 Process Images
Photos by Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop and Sean Loughrey
Installation Test
Photo by Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop and Sean Loughrey
Above and opposite: Process Images
Photos by Tania Blackwell, Dan Koop and Sean Loughrey
Group 5
Merophie
Carr, Luke Heemsbergen, Stephen Hennessy & Anne Scott Wilson
“The human race, misled by burlesque heroes made of deceptive electromagnetic substances, lost faith in the reality of life, and started believing only in the infinite proliferation of images.i
Hito Steyerl
Venice’s crystalline labyrinth, viewed through a Proustian lens, offers a resonant metaphor for our curatorial exploration. By this, we refer to a perspective inspired by Marcel Proust’s emphasis on memory, perception, and temporality—where the smallest details, like the glint of light on water or the texture of a surface, can evoke complex emotional states and collapse the distance between past and present. For us, Proust illustrates how artefacts surface, not in isolation, but through interplay with place, observation, and disruption.
This project developed under conditions that could be described as limiting or constraining, be they temporal, material, or personal. As an ephemeral collective of diverse practitioners, we were jointly informed by ideas described as ‘new institutionalism’, a curatorial approach that reimagines the role of the art institution as a site for experimentation, dialogue, and process, rather than static display.ii This approach, operating at the intersection of art making and curation, values collaboration, site-responsiveness, and horizontal structures over traditional hierarchies or power structures. Such an ethos of pushing into collectivist and processual ways of making, shaped our method: bringing together four artists from varied disciplines—performance, visual arts, design, and communication— to construct new methods of multi-disciplinary art making. In this project, Venice serves as both backdrop and catalyst—its environment prompting responsive, situated creation.
Each object and gesture produced across the week of working in situ arose from direct engagement with the locale and its myriad contexts. One artist reimagined a crystalline vase found in our accommodation—its refracted light echoing the glow of Campari or Aperol held up against a Venetian sunset. These moments of shifting light were transformed into geometric forms and video works that reflected the complex identity of Venice—its layered histories, dense tourist presence, and contemporary atmosphere. Presented at the scale of a phone screen, the videos produced for the exhibition at Palazzo Mora juxtapose watery imagery with Google Maps views and footage from the city’s narrow streets. The editing techniques—cuts, cross-dissolves, and fades to black— intentionally avoid linear narrative structure. Instead, they mirror the fragmented, recursive logic of a labyrinth, inviting the viewer into a disorienting visual field where beginnings and endings dissolve and the sense of direction becomes uncertain.
The screen functions as both a portal and a constraint—revealing aspects of place while simultaneously compressing and flattening lived experience. The city’s structure—its winding alleys and frequent dead ends—contrasts with how we navigate it digitally, eyes cast down toward GPS directions. The physical act of getting lost is replaced in our work by algorithmic certainty, reducing orientation to image-based familiarity.
Layered over this method of making, is a curated sequence of texts that reframe perception, disrupting habitual screen-based seeing and creating opportunities for presence and awareness. The project sought to interrupt comfort and predictability, placing us in unfamiliar contexts to provoke openness and responsiveness. This dislocation fostered risk—asking the group to temporarily let go of individual practices—in favour of shared investigation.
The resultant work of assorted material and performative forms, unfolded via reading, dialogue, and adaptation—while at all times living within uncertainty. A core part of this unique experience was shaped by group member Stephen Hennessy negotiating art making while navigating the complexities of a terminal illness. His presence and incredible fortitude infused the collaboration with a powerful urgency and significantly deepened its emotional texture. Themes of time, interrelation, and impermanence also anchored the work, offering a counterpoint to conventional production and creative methods.
Ultimately, this collaboration challenged conventional systems of artistic production and exhibition. It foregrounds the value of place-based encounters and contingent practices. In Venice—a city where stone meets signal, and memory intersects with mediation—the project founds its pulse. In memory of Stephen Hennessy.
i Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 6. ii Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso.
Process Image. Photo by Merophie Carr, Luke Heemsbergen, Stephen Hennessy and Anne Scott Wilson.
Above and opposite: Luke Heemsbergen and Anne Scott Wilson documenting test work
Photos by Merophie Carr and Stephen Hennessy
Above and opposite: Stephen Hennessy, Luke Heemsbergen and Anne Scott Wilson
Fabricating Artwork in Artist Residence
Photos by Merophie Carr
Stephen Hennessy performing as the minotaur, Merophie Carr
Luke Heemsbergen, Anne Scott Wilson in cayaks
Photos by Allesandro Vermicelli
Minotaur Mask
Photo by Merophie Carr, Luke Heemsbergen, Stephen Hennessy and Anne Scott Wilson
Group 6
Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter.
THE NEW DOGE OF VENICE: Let Them Eat Crab
In 2024, the title of the Venice Biennale was Foreigners Everywhere. Inspired by the artwork Stranieri Ovunque, courtesy of the artist collective Claire Fontaine, this key project was seen as exemplary for the ways in which it sought to fight racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s. In the waterlogged autumnal landscape of our 2024 Venetian Bind (VB), the phrase Foreigners Everywhere carried a plethora of meanings for us. We were after all, like most people in Venice, foreigners. The curator of the 2024 Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa noted the figure of the foreigner is associated with the stranger, the straniero. We were, in our collective eyes, a group of ‘strange strangers’. While it seems unkind to self-identify as the dregs of the Bind – we were the final group working at the very tail end of the Biennale. The Venice Biennale, Venetian Bind and the tourist season were coming to an end. Strange strangers are uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously. Their familiarity is strange, their strangeness familiar. We ‘strange strangers’, all indigenous to somewhere, were neither here nor there, and to our collective mind less than the sum of our parts. We were subscendent rather than transcendent. We did not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead, we would turn things inside out and adapt, play, and work with scraps and remains as the Venetian season petered out.
A temporary band of creatives, we set off on wet, windy and occasionally futile missions (looking at you, curators) across Venice, the Lagoon and surrounds. Intrusively framing our artistic missions, was the looming 2024 American election mere weeks away – a true foreign threat. By this stage the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had been touted by Trump and his acolytes. As we wandered Venice we picked up on the echoes of the original Doge. We visited, as many foreigners do, the Palace of the Doge and saw a recently restored 1887 painting by Vittorio Bressanin - The Last Senate of the Republic of Venice, where the last Doge descends the Giants’ Staircase of the Palazzo Ducale. For over 1000 years the Doge of Venice was both head of state and head of the Venetian oligarchy. Doges were elected for life through a complex voting process. There were some uncomfortable echoes in contemporary power struggles both local and foreign. Dressed in a sumptuous red gown Bressanin’s Doge is a symbol of the end of a history, forced to abdicate by Napoleon in 1797. The painting reflects an era meeting its demise, a collective of life forms which is evanescent and melting to the exact same extent. In the Doge, we had found a protagonist that could hold these in-betweens and allow us to face the multiphasic strange stranger.
From foreign threads we spun, we napped, we darted and wove gold fabrics, brocades, and bias. Props tumbled with pinioned disjunctions to adorn with drape, to ruche and alterate.
However, we needed a viable antagonist for our Doge, and in the recent invasion of Venice’s lagoon and the Po Delta by “granchio blu” – the blue crab, we found one. With no natural predators in Italy’s waters the crab population has surged to a critical point, devastating shellfish production and destroying thousands of traditional livelihoods. Climate change is probably a leading cause for the voracious growth of the crab. Italian Prime Minster Georgia Meloni suggested eating the predators to extinction, but fishing activists have said addressing a crisis of this scale with a cookbook is not the right approach.
Our blue crab proved elusive until one evening, in the back streets of Cannaregio, we stumbled on a small studio Codex Novus - the emerging workshop of the Codex Venezia family. In this magical workshop there are paper worlds, shadow puppets, prints… and in the window - a beautiful handmade wooden crab.
Polaroid images of the artists. Photo By Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter.
Seagull and Foot and Briony Kidd still from performance
Photos by Martin Potter and Tonya Meyrick
Tonya Meyrick and Foot Preparing for Performance
Photos by Martin Potter and Briony Kidd
Above: Group 6 Object Being Prepared for Installation
Photo By Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter
P 58-59 Performance Stills of Foot as Doge
Photos By Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter
Image of Fish and Image of Foot as Doge
Photos By Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw (Foot), Martin Potter
Installation view of the exhibition at the Deakin University Art Gallery
Photo by Polo Jimenez
Installation view of the exhibition at the Deakin University Art Gallery
Photo by Polo Jimenez
Acknowledgements
The inventory of thanks here is as long as the list of Venetian streets not accessible on Google Maps. Venetian Bind was a project supported by the Faculty or Arts and Education and the School of Creative Arts and we are grateful to Executive Dean Simon Tormey, current Executive Officer Sarah Stow and former Executive Officer Ciara Boyd for their financial and academic support. We are also grateful to Deputy Vice Chancellor International partnerships and Engagement David Halliwell and Deputy Vice Chancellor Research Matthew Clarke for their generous support. Thanks to Professor Andrea Witcomb and Professor Rea Dennis for supporting the HDR students travel to Venice.
While there are many authors of this project, Professor Cassandra Atherton deserves special mention for its gestation and belief in making it happen. A casual conversation at Deakin Downtown about going back to Venice became a reality in no small part due to her ambition and generosity. Her Co-Acting Head of School Professor Matthew Ricketson was also a strong benefactor in getting us to the starting line. Current Head of School Meghan Kelly has been a huge supporter both as a researcher, contributing valuable design nous and skills, and as a leader who helped us ride out moments of great turbulence. Thanks to Yvonne Williams and her admin team including Emma King and Sylvia Kreuzer for helping us manage the logistics and finance and finding a way to pay for all manner of strange and wonderful things in Venice.
The technical logistics of making and displaying art overseas is always complex and we are grateful to the technical team in SCCA especially Jessie Imam, Tom Goldner, John Syme, Tom Salisbury and Angus Scott for their incredible work in making the video come to life.
On the ground in Venice, we were blessed to have the extraordinary Anastasia Penteriani working as our project manager. Her generosity and insider contacts were equally remarkable, and VB simply could not have taken place without her. If we could give an honorary doctorate for services to public art wrangling at all hours of the day and night, she is first cap off the rank. Thanks also to our partners European Cultural Centre and especially Lucia Pedrano, Luigi Riccardinni and Marco Fontichiari. There are possibly 50 artisans, craftspeople, tour guides, local experts and even a gondolier called Matteo we would like to thank, and while space does not allow it, your collective generosity was wonderful and significantly enhanced the project.
We are always looking to include communities external to Deakin in the projects we do, and for Venetian Bind we called upon our ever-progressive friends at Wyndham City to join us in supporting an artist from Melbourne’s west in a valuable mentorship experience. Thanks to Tegan Lang (coordinator) and Olivia Lang for your enthusiasm, patience and capacity to bring this opportunity into being for Connor Ovenden-Shaw (aka FOOT). Their work with Group 6 was truly magnificent.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Deakin University Art Gallery team, especially Director and project curator Leanne Willis, and former curator James Lynch. This publication was designed thoughtfully and dextrously by Jasmin Tulk.
Lastly, thank you to the artists and HDR candidates for your remarkable creative responses and generosity in embracing such a curious premise, one that asked for unique levels of collaborative engagement and creative problem solving under assorted layers of adversity. Many colleagues from around the world have expressed their admiration that Deakin University has supported such a valuable capacity building project and its success is largely down to you.
We would like to dedicate this publication and exhibition to the memory of Venetian Bind artist Stephen Hennessy. A wonderful artist and designer, HDR candidate and, in his words, ‘a Venetian tragic’.
Cameron Bishop and David Cross
Venetian Bind
Deakin University Art Gallery
8 June – 8 August 2025
Venetian Bind captures key elements of an ambitious research project developed by Deakin University’s Associate Professor Cameron Bishop and Professor David Cross. It was created for the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Proudly hosted by Deakin University Art Gallery
All works are © copyright and courtesy of the artists Photography of Deakin University Art Gallery installation is by Polo Jimenez, other photography by participants as advised.
Published by Deakin University 978-0-6459431-4-6
Catalogue design: Jasmin Tulk
Deakin University Art Gallery
Deakin University Melbourne Campus at Burwood 221 Burwood Highway Burwood 3125 T +61 3 9244 5344 E artgallery@deakin.edu.au www.deakin.edu.au/art-collection
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© 2025 the artists, the authors and publisher. Copyright to the works is retained by the artists and his/her descendants. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder(s).
The views expressed within are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views held by Deakin University. Unless otherwise indicated all images are reproduced courtesy the artists.
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Deakin University acknowledges the Wadawurrung and the Wurrunderji people of the Kulin nation and the Gunditjmara people, who are the traditional custodians of the lands on which our campuses are based. We pay our respects to them for their care of the land.
Front and back cover:
Foot as ‘The Doge’
Photo by Martin Potter, Foot, Tonya Meyrick, Briony Kidd © copyright and courtesy of the artist
Opposite:
Installation view of the exhibition at the Deakin University Art Gallery
Photo by Polo Jimenez
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