Image courtesy of Malcolm Hazleton Friday 5th June: Someone I was talking to in Venice said they found the city, though beautiful, claustrophobic. Arriving in the city by kayak I found it anything but. Paddling out from Mestre Canoe Club for a reconnaissance mission on Friday evening, we crossed the lagoon in barely half an hour. The classic vista of Venice from the mainland, marked by the campanile and dome of the Basilica, drops below the horizon, and as you approach the mouth of the Cannaregio canal the division between lagoon and city begins to dissolve.
First you do have to cross an alarmingly busy shipping channel; we must have hit it at Friday evening rush hour because it was never that bad again. We then spent a couple of hours getting our bearings, losing ourselves in the complexity of the smaller canals, struggling with maps and being very pleased to have a deck compass so we could figure out which direction we were actually facing when we came out on to the Grand Canal. Eventually we did find our way out of the maze and surfed back across the lagoon in a gathering storm to the club, arriving just as the heavens opened to find Sandro (the officer for the “Settore Turismo”) waiting to introduce us to the delightful Bruno, owner of the B&B we were to be staying in for the weekend, and take us out for a pizza along with a large contingent of the club.
Sat 6th June: The wind was already getting up when we left around midday, blowing from the south west but Steve, (still a relatively novice paddler and veteran of a brief trip to Margate and a couple of practice sessions in Shadwell basin, a rather quiet dock in Wapping) was paddling with confidence and we made it across in reasonable time. Having mastered reading the rapidly delaminating map and figured out which canals to avoid (those on the main tourist gondola routes) we made our way through the city headed down the Grand Canal - where we were pleased to see plenty of announcements advertising art events - to the Travelling Light HQ on the Rio de San Vio where we received a celebrity welcome (before getting our sandwiches out in the back room).
The journey back was more eventful. Thinking it would be good for Steve to have his first view of St Mark’s from the sea, I led the others into the carnage of choppy water, gondolas, taxis and random motor boats in front of the Palazzo Ducale. As we struggled desperately to avoid being run over or capsized my annoyance was increased by the surreal appearance of a huge barge, evidently the property of a local landscape gardener carrying a single, rather bedraggled palm tree. We then escaped by diving down the first non one-way canal we could find and headed towards Mexico.
We hauled the boats out of an impossibly narrow canal and over the railings next to the Mexican pavilion and lined them up next to the water before wandering in dripping slightly. The Rota Ivancich Palace had been taken over by the artist Teresa Margolles. On first impression it seemed rather empty, allowing us to appreciate the faded grandeur of the palace. Then you notice a rather odd rusty coloured flag hanging outside the window, which the caption reveals to have been soaked in the blood of some of the 5000 people killed every year in Mexico's drug driven execution style murders, the realization of this hitting you, in this elegant setting, like a kick in the guts. In the next room someone was mopping the floor, which for a split second made us worry about our potentially dripping kayak gear, then evoked thoughts of cleaning up after some gruesome ocurrence - in fact the mopping was of mixed water and more of the blood (collected when the police come to clear up the murder scenes). Brought in contact with a remote but intensely real reality, we wander round the rest of the building, suddenly understanding what art can really do for the world and questioning the validity of all of our production to date. The spell is broken by a north American art tourist voicing her own opinion of the exhibits "boring. At best inane"
Whatever..
We saw some more art after this but the effect of Margolles’ work was to make everything else seem rather trivial in comparison. By now rather ominous clouds were starting to gather so we headed back out up the north east side of the islands past the San Michele cemetary back towards Mestre. As we rounded the corner the full force of the south west wind hit us and despite the short fetch the waves were getting quite forceful. Paddling hard we were making very little progress, the waves were getting bigger, the wind stronger and very fortunately Campalto, a small uninhabited island, completely off our course, hove into view. Steve and I whipped round the back of it, tucked in to the lee shore and clambered out on to the rocks, having completely lost Malcolm by this point. On land, everything seemed blissfully calm. As we were digging about in the hatches for emergency food supplies an amiable gent strolled across and invited us to join his scout camp who were having a barbecue on the other side of the island (an offer we sadly had to decline); moments later Malcolm appeared over the top of the island and we were able to feed ourselves, attach towlines to avoid further separation and keep Steve’s boat pointing the right way (not that he actually needed it!), set a course to the south and battle our way back to Mestre. The whole endeavour took about 2 hours, but almost certainly gave Steve several months worth of paddling experience. And once again Sandro was on hand to take us out to dinner.
Sunday 7th: Much calmer; the lagoon hardly seemed the same place as the previous day. We went straight to TL and left my boat propped outside for the edification of the visitors, who having heard good things about the exhibition were by now turning up in considerable numbers. We then transmuted into tourists and went off on foot in search of land based art (of which I wholeheartedly recommend the Portuguese and Luxembourg video installations).
I don’t know whether it is quite the same if you don’t tour Venice by water, but there is something intensely compelling about the city. From water level the rapidity of its decay is everywhere apparent, from the concreted off doorways to the canals to the salty bubbling up of render and the rising green algal coating on the lower parts of every building, reflecting the inexorable rise of the waters of the lagoon. This is a dead city; somehow, like seeing a freshly uprooted plant, though, this fact is impossible to believe. Most of the inhabitants of Venice have been forced to the mainland by rising property prices, leaving only their family names reflected in the names of the canals and walkways as a trace of their passing, but the shell of the place remains, crumbling, rotting, sinking, uniquely beautiful and quite unlike anywhere that has existed before or will ever exist again.
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