Johanna Just - Disrupting Cultural Mimicry
Venice has everything to qualify as a theatre.
A set of mind-blowing facades – witnessing the rise and fall of an empire that embraced the whole Mediterranean world. However, looking at the city today, the island is perishing under the burden of its own rich history, existing only to fulfil the tourists preconceived expectations as they take the same pictures over and over again. Stuck in a self-referential loop the city is slowly becoming a corpse without future perspectives. Building upon previous research and design projects that focused on the perception of images in relation to representation and conventional preservation methods, ‘Palazzo Pubblico’ is a proposal that tries to disrupt the Venetian ‘set’ in order to help the city break free from the loop. As an attempt to reframe the cities fossilised image, Palazzo Pubblico offers the infrastructure for integration and cultural exchange and serves as a test piece for a new association based design method at the same time.