Venezia Anno Zero is a project by Andrea Morucchio that is based on the video documentation that from March 2020 to April 2021 the Venetian artist made in his city during various lockdown periods.
Last year Morucchio developed a short film made with a selection of footage from the first three months of the 2020 lockdown titled Venezia Anno Zero that won the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Now Morucchio is preparing with the video clips - about one thousand - shot during the lockdown periods from March 2020 to April 2021 an immersive video sound installation, and an artist's book with the images extrapolated from the videos.
This approach, which I would define as "scientific" in ordering/cataloguing the video clips, makes them appear as video-sound "finds" that witness an exceptional period, probably unique in the history of the city, documenting the tangible manifestation of the most intimate, profound and involving spirit of the Venice entity.
A temporal parenthesis that drastically blocked the mono-economy of mass tourism, freeing the breath of the city otherwise suffocated by water traffic, queues in the calli and campi, garbage, air pollution and noise that such a mass of tourists and the activities linked to it without controls inevitably cause.
The creation of this video-sound diary is first of all linked to the impulse - still present even after twenty years of activity as a contemporary artist - of the photographer/reporter Morucchio carried out in the nineties who could not but seize the opportunity to document the extraordinary reality
that manifested itself just beyond the doorstep of his home.
The video footage and the relative recording of sounds such as the screeching of seagulls, the cooing of pigeons, the lapping of water or the voices and music coming from the houses succeed in expressing and transmitting more than simple photography the sensations felt in this situation.
And it is precisely the uniqueness of this video documentation, of a completely unprecedented Venice that can never be seen again, that led Morucchio to transform these short video clips
- from a minimum of 11 sec. to a maximum of 60 sec. - into NFT in 1/1 edition that represents the possibility of creating non-tangible works whose uniqueness is guaranteed by the blockchain.