SAN MICHELE

Shot in a single afternoon on the Venetian cemetery island, a ferry ride from the mainland, San Michele offers an insight into one of the most baroque displays of mass death memorial that Italy is famed for.

Grand gothic pavilions, endless fields of crosses, weather-beaten statues, names dissolving under lichen, all encased at the core of a clay-walled isle sinking further into the lagoon by the burial. A quiet theatre of remembrance, screaming at tourists from over the water. Not many listen.

Barbetta Thompson repeatedly photocopies these images, imprinting a visual decay, fading them with ink, like the monuments eroded by time. This is not a postcard or a documentary piece, but a statement of impermanence, an artistic exploration to trigger the feeling of being the only living person standing on that soil, on that day, at that time.

San Michele revels in the showmanship of beauty and power, the seduction of catholic pomp, the human impulse to preserve, to mourn, to mark our territory.