IT

At the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice, “Canicula” adopts extreme heat as a perceptive condition and a space of instability, transforming an atmospheric dimension into a device capable of questioning the relationship between body, environment, and vision. Through eight video installations commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, the exhibition constructs a sensory experience in which light, sound, technology and architecture combine to challenge the primacy of the eye.

Torrid, suffocating, sometimes even blinding heat. The summer mugginess is today more than ever a shared experience, a condition that invests the body and alters perception: it makes it difficult to listen, to walk, to look. Because yes, there is the heat, but there is also the light: an excessive, insistent presence that saturates the space and transforms it into an unstable perceptive threshold. 
The Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice, on the occasion of Canicula – the final chapter of the Trilogy of Uncertainties conceived by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, following Penumbra (2022) and Nebula (2024) ‒, reflects this condition, which is as much atmospheric as it is existential; another state, of saturation and suspension, aimed at generating disorientation. Canicula, therefore, no longer evokes merely a climatic condition, but an articulated sensory device: warm colors abruptly interrupted by cold interludes, extreme light and sudden darkness, deep silences and sound interferences. The historical architectures of the space, while maintaining their original structure, seem to bend to this perceptive tension, accompanying the visitor from the first to the last step. The scenography, designed by the studio 2050+, proposes an environment inevitably on the verge of collapse: liminal spaces, sloping floors, surfaces that appear worn out by exposure. And it is in this inseparable continuity between work, space, and display that the most relevant aspect of the exhibition resides: the desire to construct a curatorial system capable of questioning the primacy of the eye, shifting attention toward another sensitive dimension. Wishing therefore to understand space as a totality of signs, tensions, and suggestions, why not direct to other sensory stimuli the same attention reserved for the visual field? 
The entrance into the church immediately introduces this logic through Baby I’m Yours, Forever (2026) by Janis Rafa. Here the approach is eminently acoustic: even before crossing the threshold, a flow of low frequencies emerges, intertwined with what recalls a distant liturgical choir. The staging actively intervenes, thanks to the orange, almost pulsating light, which allows a glimpse of the surrounding sacred space. The contrast with what happens on the screen is radical: aseptic and brutally artificial environments show a cold storage facility dedicated to meat preservation. Mutilated bodies of non-human beings mix with live bodies of human beings, making cruelly explicit the continuity between biological, economic, and symbolic exploitation. What becomes evident, however, is not only the mere representation of this industrial process, but also and above all the mechanism of detachment necessary for this very infrastructure to continue to exist: a process of normalization that aims to hide the systematic violence of such productive processes. Other bodies, equally present, are those of the technologies that make vision itself possible. Moving past the screen, nothing is hidden: panels, cables, support structures, and technical mounts remain exposed, becoming an integral part of the installation. Technology thus ceases to function as a neutral medium to transform into a material, vulnerable presence, already at a potential breaking point.

THE CANICULA EXHIBITION IN VENICE 
This same ambiguous relationship with the technological infrastructure runs through Boring Billion (2026) by Yuyan Wang. Composed entirely through the practice of found footage, the work proposes a fragmented assemblage of automated industrial processes, mechanical repair tutorials, drone footage, and anthropomorphic devices. Here the machine is observed as a living organism: fluids and gears interlock with each other; humanoid robotic figures take their first, uncertain steps; experimental artificial organs attempt to perform the functions for which they were designed. In this case too, sound acts as the supporting structure of the work: a continuous sonic texture is cyclically crossed by distorted fragments of All This Love by DeBarge, mutating the affective promise contained in the song into an artificial and decidedly post-organic language. The progression of Boring Billion appears distressing and degenerative, revealing increasingly evident mimetic logics and behaviors between machines and living systems. If on one hand some technological infrastructures appear precarious and vacillating, on the other hand accumulation and overload characterize themselves as permanent conditions, offering a reflection on a contemporary culture increasingly anchored to processes of automation and optimization. But where, then, lies the possibility of resisting saturation? A possible answer seems to be found in subtraction, in the void, in silence. And it is precisely here that other and parallel possibilities begin to outline themselves: no longer official plans, but provisional trajectories. An example is 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound (2026) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a video installation that renders the experience of a peaceful protest that took place in Belgrade on 15 March 2025. It was an act of collective silence aimed at commemorating the victims of the collapse of a railway canopy that occurred a few months earlier. More than three hundred thousand people participated in the vigil when, suddenly, the crowd began to disperse as if fleeing from an invisible, yet inevitably present threat. In the following days, hundreds of witnesses contacted Earshot, a sonic research agency founded by the artist, asking to investigate the incident. Through thousands of written statements and a series of in-depth interviews, the group managed to reconstruct what would be one of the first documented uses of the LRAD 450XL sonic weapon: a sound imperceptible to microphones, denied by the authorities, but described with impressive consistency by all those present. Thus, the former Sala della Musica of the Ospedaletto welcomes fifteen screens on which videos of the protest and written testimonies of the participants alternate. Following the logic of a silent film, the only diegetic sound that interrupts the silence is the reconstruction of the weapon itself, meticulously elaborated by the agency. In demonstrating the possibility of transforming the sonic event into a device of control, the opposite potential of silence emerges: not absence, but a political practice of resistance.

THE VIDEO INSTALLATIONS OF CANICULA 
The eight installations, though extremely different in languages and imageries, address a common request to the public: not to limit themselves to observing the works, but to experience a condition. What the exhibition constructs is not an exhibition space, but a total sensory environment in which sight progressively ceases to occupy a privileged position, allowing new forms of listening and vulnerability to filter through. In Terminal Lucidity (2026) this same logic is taken to the extreme. Taking inspiration from the homonymous neurological phenomenon that describes a sudden return of clarity immediately preceding death, P. Staff intervenes in the space of the Ospedaletto, recalling its past as a place of care. Here perception and body completely coincide: sequences of white silhouettes are imprinted on highly saturated chromatic backgrounds, specifically chosen to fatigue the retina. When the screen suddenly returns to darkness, the image does not really disappear, but continues to persist as an optical residue. Looking, therefore, no longer coincides with the simple act of seeing, but becomes a process of producing interior images, on the border between vision and hallucination. At the same time, the acoustic component contributes to the instability of the surrounding environment: orchestral fragments, ambient recordings made in Venice, buzzes, and interferences generate a continuous variation in the visitor’s attention, between sensory overload and rarefaction. The work suggests a liminal space suspended between reality and deception, questioning the very possibility that not only vision, but even reality, might exist solely in the eye of the beholder.

THE CURATORIAL SYSTEM OF CANICULA 
Canicula thus concludes the Trilogy of Uncertainties conceived by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi: a curatorial path that, over the course of three editions of the Venice Biennale, has questioned the relationship between perception and environment through different atmospheric conditions. The eight works on display, all commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, fit within this research project, contributing to directing and, at the same time, destabilizing the visitor’s perceptive experience. If the two previous chapters investigated respectively the ambiguity of dim light and the disorientation produced by fog, here it is excess that becomes the object of investigation: blinding light and oppressive heat transform into devices capable of altering the relationship between body and space. It is precisely in the ability to construct a complex sensitive condition that the specificity of Canicula’s curatorial system is measured. Everything leads back, therefore, to the concept of ambiance: a term intentionally kept in French, since its English translation, environment, would risk being reductive. The ambiance does not simply indicate a given space, but the ensemble of relationships, intensity, and perceptive qualities that emerge from the encounter between a place and the bodies that inhabit it. An unstable texture, determined by elements as much structural as contingent: architectures, furnishings, presences, possible encounters, but also temperatures, sounds, lights, and atmospheric variations. In Canicula this dimension constitutes the true organizing principle of the exhibition: a curatorial infrastructure capable of generating sensitive tensions, continually renegotiated through the visitor’s experience. And it is perhaps precisely in this crossing, unstable and provisional, that a possible form of knowledge opens up: the one born from the step, from disorientation and from listening.

Camilla Credendino
6 may – 22 november 2026
Canicula
curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Leonardo Bigazzi
Complesso dell’Ospedaletto
Barbaria de le Tole 6691, Venezia
https://inbetweenartfilm.com/canicula/

The text has been translated in English using AI