Il Bosco Serenissimo is a multidisciplinary art project that combines architecture, mathematics, painting, oceanography, botany, music / sound, history & literature. It challenges and expands the viewer’s imagination, changing familiar visual conventions.
In both content and form, this inverted maritime forest is a metaphor for all that Venice is, what it represents and what it inspires. The project explores the close connection between the sea, the city of Venice and the forest. It emphasises the symbiosis of architectural heritage and environment; it raises awareness of the impact of the sea, shows in the digital model how digital landscape and architecture support each other, creates new awareness, connects history with the future, art with science.
Genesis
To build on the soft ground of the lagoon, the Venetians have driven into it hundreds of thousands of tree-trunks that were procured in the woods of the Cadore (Veneto Alps); larches, elms, alders, oaks, and pines… They made them descend to the lagoon letting them float along the rivers.
Headlong these tree-trunks were planted upside down to create a solid foundation for building Venice, thus the Serenissima stands on an inverted forest breathing, growing and blooming in the sea, while the whole city forms its roots.
Form
The project aims to realise a series of paintings and an animated digital 3D construction of this inverted sea forest; it shows its trees and vegetation, its creatures, its sounds, its life in direct correlation with the architecture, history, literature and art of the city of Venice; because Venice is the root of this inverted sea forest, the city nourishes it, it gives it its life, its forms and its wonders, just as the sea gives it its atmosphere and its breath.
