This year, the European Cultural Centre Italy joins Venice’s most beloved night of art for its 15th edition. Art Night, the Venetian Night of Art conceived and organised by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in partnership with the City of Venice, was born in 2011 and has since become part of the official calendar of European Art Nights. Each year it transforms the city into an open stage, inviting institutions, artists, and audiences to meet after dark in the spaces where art lives.
To mark the occasion, ECC Italy hosts three events spanning artist talks, live performance, and art activism, each one a different way of being present in the city.
Love and Mercy, Blue
A Talk Exploring Blue: Art History, Spirituality, and Encounter | Palazzo Michiel & Palazzo Bembo
Renowned art historian Cynthia Colburn leads an exploration of the colour blue through the lens of art history, followed by a Q&A with the artists and curators of Love and Mercy, Blue. The exhibition meditates on blue as both aesthetic force and contemplative invitation, a chromatic presence inseparable from mercy, tenderness, and enduring love. Blue, here, becomes a site of encounter: between inner and outer worlds, maker and viewer, teacher and student.
The evening features Pepperdine faculty and exhibiting artists Gretchen Batcheller, Kate Parsons, Kira Shewfelt, Ty Pownall, and Yvette Gellis, alongside student artists Adrineh Sahakian, Davyny Olivas, Mason Turner, Mirian Kim, and Naomi Popple.
Find out more here.
WeAreHumanity
Live Performance by Lilli Müller | Marinaressa Gardens
As part of her participation in Accepted Without Review, the experimental digital residency by DOM Art Residence presented within Personal Structures at Palazzo Bembo, artist Lilli Müller performs WeAreHumanity in the Marinaressa Gardens.
The performance invites the audience to become part of a living sculpture: Müller creates a body cast in real time, and once the plaster has hardened, volunteers are asked to lift and release it together. Each cast joins a growing installation called the Human Raft, a symbol of peace and struggle, suffering and hope, that speaks to the experiences of people undertaking dangerous journeys in search of a better life, and to humanity’s shared vulnerability and resilience.
Find out more here.
A Swag Adrift
A Performance on Water, Gesture, and the Politics of a Sinking City | Giardini della Marinaressa — Official ArtNight Event
The official Art Night event among our programme, A Swag Adrift is the evening’s most itinerant work. A small group of performers moves through Venice, enacting low-impact, repeatable gestures that measure, mark, and narrate the politics of water in the city. Rather than monumentalising the climate crisis, the work operates laterally, through minor actions, informal measurements, object collection, and the distribution of postcards that are part instruction, part proposition, part propaganda. Audiences are not simply invited to watch, but to reflect on their own relationship to Venice and its sacred and profane elements. The swag, a mobile archive accumulating traces across sites, is finally deposited at Palazzo Mora at night’s end, as both residue and prompt for more work to be done.
Find out more here.
