Ventian Bind: The New Doge
Version 2 2025-09-29, 22:26
Version 1 2025-09-19, 05:10
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posted on 2025-09-29, 22:26 authored by Martin PotterMartin Potter, Tonya MeyrickTonya Meyrick, Briony Kidd, Connor Ovenden-ShawVentian Bind: The New Doge
Funding
Venetian Bind Wyndham Artist Mentorship
History
Location
Palazzo Mora, VeniceNotes
THE NEW DOGE OF VENICE: Let Them Eat Crab Briony Kidd, Tonya Meyrick, Connor Ovenden-Shaw, Martin Potter. In 2024 the call for the Venice Biennale was Foreigners Everywhere, inspired by the artwork Stranieri Ovunque, by the artist collective Claire Fontaine, who fought racism and xenophobia in Italy in the early 2000s. In the waterlogged autumnal landscape of our 2024 Venetian Bind (VB), the phrase Foreigners Everywhere carried multitudes for us. We were, like most people in Venice, foreigners. The curator of the 2024 Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa noted the figure of the foreigner is associated with the stranger, the straniero. We were a final collective of ‘strange strangers’. We were the dregs of the Bind - at the tail end of the Biennale, the tourist season and the last group of VB artists. Strange strangers are uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously. Their familiarity is strange, their strangeness familiar. We ‘strange strangers’, all indigenous to somewhere, were neither here nor there, and less than the sum of our parts. We were subscendent rather than transcendent. We did not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead, we would turn things inside out and adapt, play, and work with scraps and remains. So we set off on wet, windy and futile missions across Venice, the Lagoon and surrounds. Intrusively framing our missions, was the looming 2024 American election mere weeks away – a true foreign threat. By this stage the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had been touted by Trump and his acolytes. As we wandered Venice we picked up on the echoes of the original Doge. We visited, as many foreigners do, the Palace of the Doge and saw a recently restored 1887 painting by Vittorio Bressanin - The Last Senate of the Republic of Venice, where the last Doge descends the Giants’ Staircase of the Palazzo Ducale. For over 1000 years the Doge of Venice was both head of state and head of the Venetian oligarchy. Doges were elected for life through a complex voting process. There were some uncomfortable echoes in contemporary power struggles both local and foreign. Dressed in a sumptuous red gown Bressanin’s Doge is a symbol of the end of a history, forced to abdicate by Napoleon in 1797. The painting reflects an era meeting its demise, a collective of life forms which is evanescent and melting to the exact same extent as she, he, they or it (how can we tell for sure?) is disturbingly ‘there’. In the Doge, we had found a protagonist that could hold these in-betweens and allow us to face the multiphasic strange stranger. From foreign threads we spun, we napped, we darted and wove gold fabrics, brocades, and bias. Props tumbled with pinioned disjunctions to adorn with drape, to ruche and alterate. However, we needed a viable antagonist for our Doge, and in the recent invasion of Venice’s lagoon and the Po Delta by “granchio blu” - the blue crab, we found one. With no natural predators in Italy’s waters the crab population has surged to a critical point, devastating shellfish production and destroying thousands of traditional livelihoods. Climate change is probably a leading cause for the voracious growth of the crab. Italian Prime Minster Georgia Meloni suggested eating the predators to extinction, but fishing activists have said addressing a crisis of this scale with a cookbook is not the right approach. Our blue crab proved elusive until one evening, in the back streets of Cannaregio, we stumbled on a small studio Codex Novus - the emerging workshop of the Codex Venezia family. In this magical workshop there are paper worlds, shadow puppets, prints… and in the window - a beautiful handmade wooden crab.Extent
1 x landscape video work 1 x portrait video work 1 x creative artefact performance and costume elementsEditor/Contributor(s)
Cross D, Bishop CStart date
2024-10-24End date
2025-11-21Research statement
Background “Venetian Bind” was the second iteration of a large collaborative project based in Venice. Associate Professor Cameron Bishop and Professor David Cross curated 24 Deakin researchers and HDR candidates to produce multi-disciplinary artworks in response to six place-specific provocations, each of which responded to the history, culture, architecture, environment and people of Venice. A subsequent exhibition of the project and publication was produced for Deakin Art Gallery in 2025. The project was initiated by the research group, Public Exchange Bureau under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Education. Contribution As a curated project I was asked to collaborate with Deakin colleague Tonya Meyrick, HDR student Briony Kidd, and artist Connor Ovenden-Shaw (aka Foot) who was supported to participate through a funded Wyndham Artist Mentorship. Our project looked at Venice as a site from which to discuss and make work about issues such as environmental sustainability and water, given the geographic proximity of the city. We produced a range of performances, artefacts and documentation and exhibited this at the Palazzo Mora in Venice and re-staged this at the Deakin University art gallery, Burwood. Significance Our group of artist-researchers were given a prompt to examine environmental power and change in Venice. Our work was inspired by the representation of the Doge in Bressanin's painting "The Last Senate of the Republic of Venice". We conceived of a New Doge who could hold the in-betweens of a multi-phasic "strange stranger". Our New Doge gestured to global shifts in power and climate. The Doge's new treasure was the invasive “granchio blu”, the blue crab which has devastated the Venetian Lagoon and Po Delta. Climate Change is the main cause for the crab's spread. Italian Prime Minster Georgia Meloni suggested eating the crab to extinction...Recognition, awards & prizes
Venetian Bind Wyndham Artist Mentorship. Wyndham City Council - $15,000.00Event
Venetian BindPublisher
European Cultural CentrePlace of publication
Palazzo Mora, VeniceUsage metrics
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