An exhibition of photographs drawing attention to the vast cruise ships in Venice that the city’s mayor pulled from the Doge’s Palace will go ahead next month, thanks to the non-profit organisation Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI), Italy’s answer to the National Trust in the UK. It is staging Venice and the Big Ships (22 October-6 January 2016) in its classic shop on St Mark’s Square, the former Olivetti typewriter showroom designed by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa in the 1950s.
The show of 30 black-and-white photographs by the photojournalist Gianni Berengo Gardin was due to open last weekend at the Doge’s Palace under the title Monsters in Venice. Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, asked the Fondazione Musei Civici (city museums) to postpone the exhibition to a later date so that it could be presented alongside a display on a new proposed route for cruise ships through the lagoon, which he strongly favours.
Berengo Gardin and the Milan-based foundation that represents his archive, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, chose to withdraw his photographs from the city museums rather than accept the conditions imposed by the mayor, reports the local newspaper La Nuova.
FAI, which showed the Monsters in Venice series last summer at Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, says in a statement that it is “delighted” to bring the exhibition to Venice to bear witness to “a wider problem involving the city, which has for years been subject to a growing, unsustainable and ungoverned influx of tourists”. The organisation says it hopes to “inspire ideas and models of sustainable, alternative and virtuous management and development for the good of Venice”.
