2024
Venice (at Hand), 2024
collage on inkjet print on Epson archival Matte paper
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Venice (at Hand) is a series of 196 works on paper made during Vlatka Horvat’s residency at the Croatian Pavilion in the frame of the 60th Venice Biennale. Each work starts with a photo of the city Vlatka takes with her phone on her daily walks, which she intervenes into in different ways: sometimes drawing on the photograph, collaging different things onto it, making cuts and reorganizing the plane of the image, sewing, scratching, and folding paper. These decidedly low-fi, analogue interventions propose different transformations of the city: sometimes practical or “useful” ones; other times, farfetched, fantastical, and entirely non-utilitarian.
In all instances though, the intervention Vlatka enacts in the image always emerges directly from something that is already present in the image. Insisting on repeated and close looking, these are acts of imagining what isn’t there from what is there; playful alterations of the commonplace that invite the viewer to see the city anew and to imagine alternative possibilities for it.
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There are 196 of these collages, corresponding to the number of works by contributing artists whom Vlatka invited to send their works to her in Venice. For each work she received at the pavilion, she sent to every artist one collage. Works of invited artists and Vlatka’s collages traveled to and from Venice in the hand luggage of friends, colleagues, and sometimes strangers recruited as couriers for the project.
Each collage bears a stamp with the process-related information, which becomes part of the work: which artist the work was sent to, which city it was carried to, and by whom.
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See info and documentation of By the Means at Hand, Vlatka’s eight-month-long project for the Pavilion of Croatia at the Venice Biennale, in the frame of which these works were produced.
Order Vlatka Horvat: By the Means at Hand catalogue from Archive Books which features over 100 of Venice (by Hand) collages
Download (free) By the Means at Hand: A Reader (PDF)
