The Civic Museums of Venice present an installation by Matthias Schaller made up of two independent photographic series “Tessuto Urbano” (2022) and “Lagunenwalzer” (2012) at the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo – White Room. Through the 53 shots on display, the German photographer summarizes his imagination of the contemporary city, inspired by De Barbari's famous sixteenth-century view.

The “Urban Fabric” series portrays the seven Sestieri of Venice through a succession of seven shots obtained from the same seventeenth-century lace belonging to the Burano Museum Collection. Each photograph reproduces, according to a scale reduction, a Venetian district, guiding the observer among the intricate finishes of the fabric that become the streets and squares of the city. Lace, a symbol of the past and current manufacturing of lagoon textile production, has stimulated the historical soul of the artist and is a metaphor for the urban dimension of the city. This series is accompanied by "Lagunenwalzer", a selection of 46 vinyls taken from a Venetian archive of punk music. The discs, in their close succession, become the correlative of the water that insinuates itself into Venice and which constitutes its peculiarity.

The vinyls with their engraved surfaces outline the horizon of the view and their provocative titles allude to the latent revolution in the spirit of the city. Matthias Schaller, with a fond eye on the Venetian reality, to which he has dedicated seven projects to date, uses his strategy of the indirect portrait to propose an alternative image of Venice to the city map. In this exhibition, lace and vinyl are the figures of an immersive metaphor of the urban environment, which reflects on the city's past and simultaneously addresses the observer, activating our imagination without imposing the spatial delimitation to which the topography forces us.