Fondazione Merz and MUVE, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, present the Velme exhibition, a site-specific project by Marzia Migliora. The works are on display in some of the rooms of the Museo del Settecento Veneziano in the historic Palazzo Ca’ Rezzonico.

The project is characterised by forms of expression that are recurrent in the artist’s production: the desire to show that which is hidden and to bring out that which is submerged, the relationship with space and the history of places.

Marzia Migliora aims to bring out the contradictions and repeated exploitation – of natural resources, of human resources and labour, typical of the history of mankind – through the clues emerging from the history of the lagoon city and from the works conserved in Ca’ Rezzonico, establishing a dialogue and contrasting them with those made by herself.

The artist accomplishes this here by extrapolating some elements from the collection, bringing them to life and showing them in a new light, shifting the point of view of the visitor, and by doing so returning them to us and to our times.

The title of the exhibition aptly summarises the considerations that underpin the project.

The word velma is the Venetian term for a shoal, indicating a shallow area in the lagoon that emerges during low tides. These shoals, just like the entire ecosystem of the Venetian lagoon, are at great risk because of the morphological degradation and erosion of the seabed, caused by a lack of awareness and the continued violations perpetrated by man.

The velma, the “meeting point” in the relationship between water and land, the symbol of something underwater that never stops emerging, thus becomes “an urgency of the present” and a bridge that connects us with the past.