Arsenale

This is yet another required blog, in response to the Arsenale portion of the Venice Biennale. This was a smaller and more compact gallery than the actual Biennale. The gallery was set up in a long skinny room that was divided up by half walls and little rooms in the very center that had video installations. The walls were lined with a very wide variety of painting, photography, and drawings and about every other medium you could imagine.
The series of work that caught my eye was a set of large, color photographs taken by Gabriele Basilico an artist from Milan Italy. These were photographs of Beirut in 1991 just after the earthquakes rocked the area, creating devastation and destruction in a matter of seconds. These photographs had a quality to them that struck me right away; they were eerily still and beautiful. The subject of the pictures was a building or common street scene, showing the damage caused during the earthquake. The unique thing about these photographs is that they were all taken at the same time and in the same conditions but in different locations. You can easily tell this just by looking at them because of the current weather condition in each picture, the ground is dark and wet from a recent rain and the sky is the white-grey color that only happens after a good rain. These conditions make for perfect and almost startling contrast between the dark wet pavement and buildings and the bright light of the sky. This makes the pictures almost look fresh and clean, which is an interesting thing to occur especially considering how dirty and broken the subject matter really is. Another thing that adds to this fresh and clean image is the fact that you see no evidence of any recent human life; it is completely the void of any life at all. There are broken down cars and abandoned toys that appear to have been there for quite some time, it makes it look as if the area has been uninhabited for a long time.
I felt that choosing to portray such a sad and bleak situation and scene in such a way speaks of hope and rebirth, or at least that’s what I got from it. The scenes looked so calm and still, as if it were just waiting for people to come and live there, fill those broken old buildings with life once again. The artist took a scene that if shot in any other way would tell a story of the horrors of Beirut at the time, showing these crumbling buildings riddled with bullet holes but she instead chose the perfect lighting and weather conditions to convey the desired effect and emotion.