Re-Flooring part II

RE-FLOORING part II
Andrea Morucchio Installation
Tesa 2, _docks_cantieri cucchini, Venezia
curated by Laura Riolfatto, 2024 Enologismi 
May 24 - September 30 2024 

The installation project Re-Flooring consists of nine printed panels - eight 1,25x1,25 mt, one 2,25x2,25 mt - hanging on the walls. The different images printed on the single panels reproduce the initial stills of the corresponding video animation. The nine different animations correspond to as many NFTs entitled Re-Flooring nft video. 

Each video consists of 25 photographic tiles that reassembled reproduce a part of the St. Mark Basilica mosaic pavement; starting from a situation of fragmentation of the tiles, a lapping sound recorded in the lagoon and that of cadenced cobblestones give rhythm to the gradual recomposition until the original figure is reproduced.

The project was originally developed in 2022 as site-specific at the Isola delle Rose Church in collaboration with JW Marriott Venice.

In 2024, to coincide with Morucchio’s solo exhibition The Puzzling Classics Show and the start of the 60th Venice Biennale, the Re-Flooring project is presented again in the spaces of Tesa 2 by _docks_cantieri_cucchini. The work is experienced through the use of a free downloadable augmented reality app; the visitors by framing the panels with a smartphone “transform” them into monitors that transmit videos with relative sounds.

The images that make up each of the nine panels are taken from a photographic documentation of the mosaic floor of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice made in the years preceding the current situation in which many marble tesserae are estimated to need to be replaced; this documentation represents a historical-artistic testimony as it preserves the visual memory of an extraordinary treasure that was already severely compromised.

These photographic tesserae were first created and used iconoclastically in 2015 as one of the most significant installation elements of The Rape of Venice project (Andrea Morucchio, Museo Mocenigo, MUVE Contemporaneo, 56th Venice Biennale) by installing a surface on the ground that reproduced the tesserae in a way that decomposed and dissolved the geometric figures and representations of animals and plants that make up the mosaics of St. Mark’s.

Morucchio corrected, cleaned, and digitally rearranged more than 9,000 tessellations that he is also using to process the digital artwork series of the Puzzling project, of which a couple of works from the Puzzling Rennaisance series, Il Paradiso and La Tempesta are exhibited here.