Performing Venice’s Stones: Vedute Manoeuvre Redux

‘Venice excels in blackness and whiteness; water makes commerce between them’. So writes Adrian Stokes, his 1947 study of the city, its architectures, art. This very sentence performs a problem Venice that has vexed those who have made art, literature, other writing from city: asks us to take measure, shadows light, stones—but this is even more complex than chiaroscuro, ‘commerce’, aesthetic economic, plays with what clear not, tipping registers we fail fully comprehend. And thus are brought too often perform replicate such confusion inability ‘account for’ polytropic, polymaterial, polytemporal city simultaneously operates upon, or ‘makes between’. yet there an artistic method can account for strange highly problematic spoliate economies Venice, which also bridges walking practice as political performance situated art historical practice. poetic-performance provided by artist Tim Brennan’s Vedute Manoeuvre, first performed Biennale 2011, re-performed part research work documented here. I claim, whose polyvocalic polyvisual modes, art-act common experience complexity architectural commons perhaps only way ‘giving voice to’ problems encounter when water, stones. We re-orientate multiple ways spoliate, colonial, archipelagic been found difficult previous attempts accounting (and, indeed, with) vexing Manoeuvre invitation toward ‘redux’, crux solution. The presented here—an essay truest sense—is mode demonstrates own attitudes question manoeuvre act itself.