A Million Decaying Tree Stumps

By Grant Archer

170 x 290mm
40pp / 120gm Uncoated

The ritual started by chance, a day trip from the mainland on a family holiday. Arriving by road across the long causeway before weaving in and out of alleyways and piazzas, before being confronted by the sights I had seen in the monographs of countless artists. Not the renaissance paintings of Bellini or Veronese that hang in the academia but the shipping container clock of Darren Almond, the pearlescent spaceship of Mariko Mori, Damien Hirst’s Wreck of the Unbelievable…

We joined the tradition in the 50th Edition of the Venice Biennale, myself and my dad returning every two years to see the pavilions of the Giardini and the munitions factory of the Arsenale transformed into living galleries of contemporary art from across the world. With national councils and unrecognised states spilling their participation out into those original alleyways and piazzas it has become a treasure hunt, recorded over 20 years in these images.

Venice is a city unlike any other. Perched on a million decaying tree stumps and for centuries the heart of its own empire it still today exists apart from its relatively recently unified mother state. At every turn is a reminder of the issues that face us as people, from immigration to an economy built on a tourism that prices out locals, a unesco site constantly in need of repair to a place that can never forget its on the front line of climate change, with lagoon waters expensively kept from ever sinking structures.

These pictures are ultimately a project of a project within a project. My own document of other people’s art in a city itself a sculpture.