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Maya Tounta
Note to the Reader
Inspired in part by Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Note to the Reader investigates the intertwined histories of Venice and art through artists’ moving-image works and archival film, approaching the city less as a geographical location than as a projection screen onto which successive visions of art and culture have been cast, often in tension with the realities of the city itself.
Taking Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour (1983) as a conceptual point of departure, the project examines how Venice has been observed, documented, staged, and imagined across different historical periods and media, while tracing in parallel the shifting ideals, values, and fantasies through which art has imagined itself.
Note to the Reader
Taking Susan Sontag’s Unguided Tour (1983) as a conceptual point of departure, the project examines how Venice has been observed, documented, staged, and imagined across different historical periods and media, while tracing in parallel the shifting ideals, values, and fantasies through which art has imagined itself.
Beginning with some of the earliest actuality films produced at the turn of the twentieth century, the project traverses documentary, propaganda, experimental cinema, artists’ film, and contemporary moving-image practices, from Thomas A. Edison and Francesco Pasinetti to Susan Sontag, Yervant Gianikian, and Angela Ricci Lucchi. Rather than reconstructing a history of Venice alone, the research asks how the city has served as a site through which art has continually projected and negotiated its own imaginaries, and how these images, in turn, shape the ways Venice is experienced, remembered, and imagined.
The (envisioned) outcome of the (her) residency (at Ca’Buccari) would be a research dossier and a preliminary curatorial framework for a film programme, potentially extending to site-specific screenings that place moving images in dialogue with Venice’s histories, architectures, and urban imaginaries, while opening up encounters between film, performance, and other artistic forms. A first iteration of the programme is tentatively envisioned to coincide with the Venice International Film Festival in September.
The (envisioned) outcome of the (her) residency (at Ca’Buccari) would be a research dossier and a preliminary curatorial framework for a film programme, potentially extending to site-specific screenings that place moving images in dialogue with Venice’s histories, architectures, and urban imaginaries, while opening up encounters between film, performance, and other artistic forms. A first iteration of the programme is tentatively envisioned to coincide with the Venice International Film Festival in September.
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.