Pulse Red | Venezia

Pulse Red

September 23 - 25, 2009 | video installation | Fontego dei Tedeschi, Venezia

Conceived for Outdoors project

Curated by Gaia Conti, Domitilla Musella

Installed in the courtyard of the historic Fontego dei Tedeschi, PULSE RED consists of four video monitors set into white wooden panels forming a large rectangular structure at the centre of the space. Each screen faces one side of the cloister, creating a luminous, self-contained object that radiates an arrhythmic red light. The monitors display video documentation of Morucchio’s earlier public intervention, establishing a dialogue between past and present, between the ephemeral act and its reactivation within a transformed social and architectural context.

As noted by Gaia Conti and Domitilla Musella in “Purposes” (2009), “Pulse Red is an artistic intervention focused on the synergy between the art scene and the public, aimed at establishing a direct communication, beyond any form of mediation, between the artist and spectator.” Within this vision, the work “is not simply an installation, rather it is a public art intervention. It is a meta-piece in which every aspect of representation functions as a key leading back to a precise creative moment.”

Conceived by Andrea Morucchio for the OUTDOORS project, PULSE RED brings art into the public sphere, moving beyond conventional exhibition spaces to engage directly with the urban and symbolic fabric of Venice. The work develops, as Conti and Musella describe, “a reciprocal historic and visual linguistic pertinence,” operating through “minimal actions and shifts of meaning that gradually accompany the public toward a centre of pulsing interest.”

This second intervention at the Fontego dei Tedeschi reawakens the aesthetic and conceptual resonances of the original PULSE RED action at Punta della Dogana (2004), when an illuminated red interference was projected toward the golden globe atop the Dogana da Mar, symbolically exploring the notion of boundaries and the mechanisms of media communication. In the new context, Morucchio reintroduces one of the core elements of the earlier project—the arrhythmic pulsation of red light as a signal, an alarm.

Within the Fontego, this pulsation acquires a deeper layer of meaning: it becomes a reflection on the social, cultural, and anthropological destiny of Venice itself. The red alarm can be read as a metaphor for the city’s transformation through processes of privatization and touristification, embodied by the fate of the building itself—once the historic headquarters of Venice’s Central Post Office, later closed, renovated, and converted into a luxury shopping mall for tourists.

Conti and Musella emphasize how PULSE RED “creates a dialogue between the first performance and the place where it now repeats itself, developing a trajectory of meaning and continuity in the relationship it establishes with the sites.” Like Punta della Dogana, the Fontego dei Tedeschi “was and is a place of exchange,” a node of both material and informational flow. The new installation, therefore, not only recalls the earlier action but also embeds it within a space charged with layers of historical and economic significance.

Recontextualized within the cloister of the Fontego dei Tedeschi, PULSE RED becomes both a documentation and a re-elaboration. Through the looping, flickering rhythm of red light, it transforms the act of viewing into a meditation on temporality, visibility, and the politics of space in contemporary Venice. The red pulse, once cast outward across the lagoon, now beats inward—an enclosed yet resonant echo of a gesture that continues to question the thresholds between art, memory, and urban transformation.