Maya Tounta
Note to the Reader
Film screening of Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour (1983) and reading with Maya Tounta
Saturday October 31st, 6pm
Inspired in part by Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and taking Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour (1983), originally titled Giro turistico senza guida, as a point of departure, Note to the Reader explores the intertwined histories of Venice and art through artists’ moving-image works, archival film, and text. Spanning from some of the earliest actuality films produced at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary moving-image practices, the research brings together documentary, propaganda, experimental cinema, and artists’ film, including works by Thomas A. Edison, Francesco Pasinetti, Yervant Gianikian, and Angela Ricci Lucchi.
Through these materials, Venice emerges as both a historical site and a projection screen onto which successive visions of art and culture have been cast, revealing the shifting ideals and fantasies through which the city has been observed, staged, and imagined, often in tension with its lived realities.
The event will include a screening of Susan Sontag’s Giro turistico senza guida (1983), also known as Unguided Tour or Letter from Venice. Originally conceived as a short story, first published in Sontag’s collection I, etcetera (1978), the work was reimagined for Italian television as a film set in Venice. Starring choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs and Italian actor Claudio Cassinelli, it follows two lovers on a visit to the city, where their encounters with its streets, canals, and decaying grandeur unfold alongside the gradual unravelling of their relationship. Neither conventional fiction nor documentary, the film moves between narrative, observation, and interior reflection. Sontag described it as an essay, using Venice as a setting for thinking through tourism and melancholy, the strangeness of inhabiting a place already saturated with images and expectations, and the uncertain boundary between travelling through a city and moving through one’s own memories.
The screening will be accompanied by a reading of notes developed during the ongoing residency research. Beginning with the origins of the Venice Biennale, established in 1895 at the initiative of Venice’s mayor Riccardo Selvatico, the text follows a series of historical and material traces across the lagoon. These include the makeshift capannine assembled from driftwood and other found materials along the free beaches of the Lido, particularly around Alberoni and the Murazzi, alongside the history of the trabacche and capanne that shaped the island’s bathing culture. Elsewhere, the research turns to the cemetery on Mazzorbo, where fading photographic portraits on funerary plaques raise questions about the material life of images and the technologies through which likenesses are preserved. Moving between architectural structures, archival traces, and the fragile surfaces of photographic images, the notes explore how encounters with the built environment can open onto broader histories of art, social life, and cultural memory.
Note to the Reader
Film screening of Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour (1983) and reading with Maya Tounta
Saturday October 31st, 6pm
Through these materials, Venice emerges as both a historical site and a projection screen onto which successive visions of art and culture have been cast, revealing the shifting ideals and fantasies through which the city has been observed, staged, and imagined, often in tension with its lived realities.
The event will include a screening of Susan Sontag’s Giro turistico senza guida (1983), also known as Unguided Tour or Letter from Venice. Originally conceived as a short story, first published in Sontag’s collection I, etcetera (1978), the work was reimagined for Italian television as a film set in Venice. Starring choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs and Italian actor Claudio Cassinelli, it follows two lovers on a visit to the city, where their encounters with its streets, canals, and decaying grandeur unfold alongside the gradual unravelling of their relationship. Neither conventional fiction nor documentary, the film moves between narrative, observation, and interior reflection. Sontag described it as an essay, using Venice as a setting for thinking through tourism and melancholy, the strangeness of inhabiting a place already saturated with images and expectations, and the uncertain boundary between travelling through a city and moving through one’s own memories.
The screening will be accompanied by a reading of notes developed during the ongoing residency research. Beginning with the origins of the Venice Biennale, established in 1895 at the initiative of Venice’s mayor Riccardo Selvatico, the text follows a series of historical and material traces across the lagoon. These include the makeshift capannine assembled from driftwood and other found materials along the free beaches of the Lido, particularly around Alberoni and the Murazzi, alongside the history of the trabacche and capanne that shaped the island’s bathing culture. Elsewhere, the research turns to the cemetery on Mazzorbo, where fading photographic portraits on funerary plaques raise questions about the material life of images and the technologies through which likenesses are preserved. Moving between architectural structures, archival traces, and the fragile surfaces of photographic images, the notes explore how encounters with the built environment can open onto broader histories of art, social life, and cultural memory.
Maya Tounta is a curator and writer based between Athens and Vilnius. She is the co-founder and director of Akwa Ibom, a nonprofit exhibition space established with Otobong Nkanga in 2019. In 2024, she co-curated the 15th Baltic Triennial, Same Day, at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Formerly Art Director of e-flux Journal, she has written for publications including Flash Art, CURA., and Apartamento.
Together with Melas Martinos and Radio Athènes, she co-stewards the archives of Christos Tzivelos and George Tourkovasilis, and is co-editor of George Tourkovasilis: Strange Switch. Spent. The Night, Sleep, a monograph on the artist's work published by BILL.
Image: Francesco Pasinetti, La Gondola (1942). Film still. Courtesy of Istituto Luce.
Together with Melas Martinos and Radio Athènes, she co-stewards the archives of Christos Tzivelos and George Tourkovasilis, and is co-editor of George Tourkovasilis: Strange Switch. Spent. The Night, Sleep, a monograph on the artist's work published by BILL.
Image: Francesco Pasinetti, La Gondola (1942). Film still. Courtesy of Istituto Luce.
Image: Francesco Pasinetti, La Gondola, 1942. Film still. Courtesy of Istituto Luce.