Competing Projects 2025
Agli IncurabiliStefano Marotta
The headquarters of the Academy of Venice is a building from the first half of the sixteenth century that over the centuries was converted from a hospital to a barracks, then to a reformatory. By a strange twist of fate, its rooms have been inhabited by orphans, delinquents, soldiers, but above all, plague victims deemed incurable. The students who attend the Academy today persist – as Cioran would say – in “expecting the impossible, blinding themselves as only the incurable can,” and the same happens to the teachers, who stubbornly daydream, zigzagging through the classrooms, laboratories, library, corridors, staircases, among the shelves and ancient casts, between public safety notices and writings on the walls. In this maze of spaces, gathering suggestions that recall the blackish amalgam of punk fanzines: a summa summarum that continues to layer, with ardor and audacity, because one can never recover from the fevers of art.
