Stephan Rabold, Germany

A Dream of Venice

This time it's not one of those shiny colourful dreams of Venice, filled with sticky clichés. It‘s more a dark dream, a nightmare which might and probably will happen to the city if there is no change. The town surrounded and covered by water is built on mud and wooden poles. Venice decays more and more with progressive erosion, rising sea-level, extreme climate changes and last but not least the intense tourism. Houses and palaces are soaking water from the lagoon and so far all attempts to prevent the decline seem to have failed.

In my dream I walk the streets of Venice and can barely see any sun. The decay infests my view of the city. Water runs down the photographs, corrosion seems to gnaw the silver from the negatives and cracks show through the pictures like they do in the ailing buildings in reality. And the sun seems to stay somewhere outside, shrouded, a muffled glow that is barely visible. When I walk those streets I always think that the real world must be somewhere outside.

I tried to put my impressions of the town into the pictures. After I took a photograph I laid the instant negative down and scratched it over the ground so it might take a bit of the aura of the spot. Without cleaning I put the originals together, let them dry so the rest of chemistry remains. Through that procedure I feel the town with all its decay creeps into my pictures, all the photographs seem soaked with the water and the mud on which Venice is build on.