Krossing | Mestre

KROSSING Immaginodromo

June 7 - November 22, 2009 | photography | Forte Marghera, Mestre

Collateral event 53^ Biennale di Venezia

Curated by Orsola Casagrande

On the occasion of Krossing – Immaginodromo, a collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Andrea Morucchio presented the photographic triptych Improvviso terrore mi sospende il fiato e allarga nella notte gli occhi (A sudden terror halts my breath and widens my eyes in the night), whose title is drawn from a poem by Camillo Sbarbaro. Visually striking and deeply evocative, the work consists of a sequence of photographs taken during a stormy night along the Malecón in Havana, Cuba.

In these images, the sea reveals itself in multiple forms — water transforming into mist, light merging with darkness, the visible dissolving into the invisible. Morucchio captures a fleeting, almost hallucinatory moment in which perception becomes unstable: the viewer seems to hear the wind and the waves even within the silence of the image. Through this nocturnal vision, the artist transforms a familiar landscape into an ambiguous, dreamlike space where the boundaries between matter and spirit, reality and imagination, begin to blur.

As Marina Castrillo observed, “Andrea Morucchio is able to seize ambiguous paths of perception from well-known landscapes such as that along the Malecón – a nighttime picture postcard of Havana, a city of reddish earth, water and air daunting like spirits immersed in an ancestral fury, that awake and alarm eyes in the night.” Her words illuminate how the artist transforms a recognizable place into a metaphysical territory of perception and emotion, where natural elements seem animated by an ancestral, almost spiritual energy.

Castrillo further notes: “The imaginary sound, the disappearing water, the spreading silence, the world that begins with the image and finishes in the observer, all of these end the visual spell of a unique Cuban stroll, so suggestive and yet so ordinary.” In this way, the work becomes a meditation on the act of seeing itself — an exploration of how images awaken sensory memory and emotional resonance beyond their visible form.

The presentation of Morucchio’s triptych formed part of Krossing, a wide-ranging artistic project conceived as a reflection on the many meanings of “crossing” — geographical, cultural, and perceptual. Organized by Marco Polo System and supported by various institutions of the Venice City Council, Krossing aimed to extend the Biennale’s cultural reach beyond its traditional venues, engaging sites such as Forte Marghera, a monumental complex symbolically positioned between the mainland and the lagoon.In this context, Morucchio’s work resonated deeply with the curatorial theme: the transformation of place and perception, the crossing between natural and mental landscapes. The tension between the seen and the unseen, the real and the imagined, becomes the very essence of a visual journey that, as Castrillo writes, “begins with the image and finishes in the observer.”

Exhibiting artist: Primoz Bizjak, Aldo Aliprandi, Andrea Morucchio, Daniel Darsie, Monia Marchionni, Vania Comoretti, Paolo Comuzzi, Chris Gilmour, Stefano Marotta, Roberto Russo, Lorenzo Missoni, Nancy Rossit, Artan Shabani, Robert Aliaj (Dragot), Klodian Deda, Vénera Kastrati, Tiziana Pers, Isabella Pers, Guido Baldessarri, Stefano Momentè, Stefano Zanus, Franco Cimitan, Roberto Fontanella,  Tobia Ravà, Thomas Reichegger, Wolfgang Zingerle, Achot Achot, Archi Galentz, Emily Artinian, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Christopher Atamian, Hayk Tokmajyan,