“Pulse Red”, critic text by Francesca Colasante & Andrea Morucchio, 2004, eng

The sphere overhanging the tower becomes the support for an intermittent red signal beam. Punta della Dogana / the Customs Point has always been a place of great symbolic power, where one can embrace the whole city in one glance, where human activity meets that of nature. Now, as in the past, boats laden with people and goods come and go; a crossroads of peoples, cultures and different goals. It is exactly this characteristic that not only stimulated the formal and conceptual part of the work, but also provides the key to understanding its message.

The Golden Globe as a point of attraction for those coming by sea to Venice and the Customs House as point of contact with the rest of the world, historic place of exchange, storage and classification. The extreme point where information was prepared and then later broadcast to the city and the rest of the known world.

The communication system between different cultures of those days was powered by Venice’s extraordinary role as catalyst within the commercial canal network of that time. Inspired by these considerations, Morucchio elaborates a work that examines the hegemonistic tendency of today’s mass media; the pulsing globe becomes an antenna-screen which intercepts the electromagnetic signals of today’s communication flows and absorbs their intelligibility, reducing them to a simple flashing beam.

Allegory, red alert, a system on the edge of collapse, the imposition of propaganda, pervasive, the rhythm of relentless bombardment of information, repeatedly question the individual’s capacity to understand and filter messages. A work such as this exploits the visibility of the place to insert the antagonistic message into the main stream, appropriating its codes of behaviour.

In this case the spectacularisation of the artistic gesture works in the opposite way to affirm the necessity for an examination of conscience, usually blurred on such a large scale. A tiny intervention of public art that resounds through three elements: architecture, history and the spirit of a place.