If All Time Is Eternally Present

Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, Venice

If All Time Is Eternally Present stages a nocturnal encounter between moving image, architecture, and public space on the façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin (1963 – 1972), transforming it into an urban exhibition device.

The exhibition, supported by Bottega Veneta, inaugurates Building Dialogue, a new curatorial programme that extends the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation research toward a dialogue with artistic practices, interpreting Nervi’s architecture as a speculative tool through which to interrogate the contemporary condition. In dialogue with the videoworks, the façade amplifies the potential of projection as a form of public discourse-making, asserting the cultural agency of the ephemeral and opposing the monument-city with the values of impermanence.

The exhibition’s title – an homage to T. S. Eliot – encapsulates the temporal coexistence of Nervi’s legacy and the contemporaneity of the works on display. The notions of Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) and Jetztzeit (the time of now) frame the theoretical relationship between the works and the building, both interpreters of their time and as agents that actively question it. The project represents for Nervi an opportunity of engagement with debates surrounding modernity.

Commissioned to design the new headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia on the site of anineteenth-century building, he offered a paradigmatic contribution to broader processes of cultural, urban, and social renewal in which architecture would assume a central role. In its praise of discontinuity, Palazzo Nervi Scattolin resonates with the practices of Williams, Bennani & Barki, and Shani: subjective readers of a collective condition, offering critical tools to address and reframe the present, much as Nervi’s architecture did in its own historical moment.

The building’s façade operates as a site of display, staging the collision between medium and message while simultaneously mediating the relationship between architecture and its representation, between private and public, between citizen and city. Its distinctly urban character shifts the curatorial discourse toward its most public dimension – the projection generates a spatial experience in which the works enter into a situated relationship that alters their conditions of appearance and reception, facilitating the interaction of image, space and body.

The exhibition takes the form of a scenographic apparatus that draws upon Venice’s long tradition of temporary architecture, through which the city has historically shaped its relationship with collective memory and with the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. The nocturnal condition configures a space-time endowed with specific modes of sociability and political implications, shifting modes of spectatorship from consumption to encounter and generating experiences of dérive, dreamscape, and wonder engaging a plural and unanticipated public.

If All Time Is Eternally Present delineates a geography in which Venice is an allegory of both local and global conditions, where historical memories and present-day frictions intersect in relation to New York, Rabat, London, Berlin, and Baltimore – sites that inform the artists’ practices and serve as stages for the dialectic between subjectivity and identity, for power dynamics, and for the processes of globalization and migration. The exhibition space does not merely reflect these complexities but renders them intelligible, proposing a rereading of places as cultural matrices and advancing an idea of Venice as the theatre of a plural world. Projected onto architecture within a nocturnal landscape, the works generate an urban, experiential, and relational possibility.

Curated by Chaira Carrera and Marta Barina