The catalogue of the exhibition “Futuruins: The Future of Ruins and Ruins of the Future” that opened in Venice on 17 December 2018 has been published (editor Daniela Ferretti, publisher Grafiche Veneziane, 2018, 255 pp.).
“Futuruins” is a joint project between the Hermitage (curator Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the Department of Contemporary Art), and the Museo Fortuny (curator Daniela Ferretti, Director of the Palazzo Fortuny). The display, occupying three storeys of the Gothic Palazzo Fortuny, symbolizes an endless spiral in which ruins are an image of the eternal struggle and indissoluble link between past and present, life and death.
As Dmitry Ozerkov writes in the introduction to the catalogue: “Ruins have always existed: it is impossible to establish the historical moment when there were no ruins yet and it is hard to imagine a time when there will be none. ‘Past’ and ‘future’ are merely words that allow us to describe a person’s life or grasp the flow of time. Every artist is reckoned to have early, middle and late periods in which they respectively formed as an artist, were at the height of their powers and finished their career.”
For that very reason, the “Futuruins” exhibition incorporates a very broad range of exhibits, eras, artists and ideas. Alongside works by Jean Dubuffet, Francesco Jodice and many other 20th- and 21st-century artists, visitors will be able to see others by Caspar David Friedrich, Albrecht Dürer, Jacopo and Francesco Bassano, as well as ancient stones and illustrations of age-old legends.
In the foreword to the catalogue, Daniela Ferretti, the Director of the Palazzo Fortuny and curator of the exhibition, writes: “Less than a year has passed since the moment when Dmitry Ozerkov suggested holding an exhibition in the Palazzo Fortuny on the subject of ruins to me. So, we set off on the long and difficult path to define and structure a project that would be capable of giving shape to such a multifaceted topic, rich in associations and suggestions. Futuruins strives to interpret the historical complexity of the concept and the aesthetics of ruins: from myths to iconoclastic rage, from the symbolic power of masonry to parallels between the body and architecture, from the alternation of destruction and reconstruction to the present day.”
The catalogue is arranged on a thematic basis and comprises the following sections: “Fragments. Time. Layers”, “The Aesthetics of Ruins” and “Construction. Destruction. Reconstruction”.