We would like to invite you to an extraordinary photography exhibition by Dominika Rafalska entitled ‘Venice - the vanishing city’.
The exibition will be presented in the UG Gallery in the Main Library
from March 10 untill April 17, 2025.
The background consisted entirely of the dark silhouettes of church domes and roof tops; the bridge arched over the black curvature of the water, both ends of which were cut off by infinity. At night, a sense of the infinity of unfamiliar territories is given by the last street lamp and just such a lamp was shining twenty metres away. It was very quiet. From time to time there was the vague light of a boat raking nearby...’
These words by Yosif Brodsky, written in the essay The Watermark, accompanied me on my - half realistic, half magical - trip to Venice....
In February 2024, I landed at Venice's Marco Polo Airport, equipped only with my hand luggage, which consisted mainly my camera, a few notebooks and the aforementioned book. The fog was so thick that I still wondered for a long time how the pilot had managed to land. However, I was filled with joy because I had deliberately travelled to Venice against a common way: in winter, after Carnival, in search of cool, wintry, austere scenery. I wanted to capture in my frames Venice where solitude and silence can be found.
Venice is still a place not of this earth. A city resounding with the music of Vivaldi. Smelling of seaweed. Obscure. Empty. A city so cramped that the proper sense of perspective is lost. A place where you have to put on a wide-angle lens. And on winter days, the camera gets ‘silly’ trying to set the right white balance parameters.
I wanted to show Venice ‘off the beaten track’, a city where Canaletto's paintings recur, because everything there is a veduta. The atmosphere of mystery is completed by the fog, which can be so thick that you can get lost in it literally a few steps away. From the middle of St Mark's Square you cannot see the basilica, but you know it is there. A lot is going on in the world of understatement, illusion and imagination.
My photographs take viewers to a Venice seen ‘my way’, the city where single metres of waterfront can be ‘picturesque’. The city that can be so empty that sometimes you have to wait several minutes to find a person to complete the frame in a photograph.
It is also a tribute to slowness, concentration, contemplation, a search for references to the paintings of the old masters, voices from the past... I find unbelievably sad something that I have included in the title of this exhibition: Venice is disappearing. Trampled underfoot by the shoes of day-trippers, flooded by the waves of the lagoon, reduced to a banality: a postcard view, a carnival mask or an attractive magnet. A transit city... I will ask after Milan Kundera: ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?’... On those grey winter days when I walked alone through Venice, this question also accompanied me. I hope I have managed to capture this slowness in my frames....
Dominika Rafalska: journalist, editor, researcher.
‘Photography is my passion, an escape from reality and a journey into myself. In my frames I try to stop the transience of the world and also what we often fail to notice’.