The Darkest Corners

How much space do we give to others and how do we take care of this space? In „The Darkest Corners“, Lena Marie Emrich‘s works become the valve for a sensitive merging of the architectural, historical, as well as the imaginative within the one environment that is continually longing for poetry and magic: Venice. Her work has been heavily influenced by the urban historical venue, its materials and landscape. Thoughtful combinations of materials develop a significant formal reasoning within the objects. Spatial arrangements, as well as construction and mounting, demand a thought-out technique that respects the oldest walls, as well as each screw. As objects, they carry within them a lightness and fragility, while also being integral and functional. Their meaning changes depending on the viewing angle and light: sometimes reflecting,sometimes appearing waterlike. In a way, the organic forms of the sculptures create a mimicry effect, with each sculpture reacting individually to the corner it is inhabiting. Like organisms, they grow out from the walls, just as the shells are growing in the lagoon. Venice is always a web of symbolic allusions, and the sculptures are artworks reflecting its endless connections representing tradition in contemporary times. There is no such thing as a path that leads nowhere. The pissabraga, pissotte, or gobbe antibandito are not sculptures dedicated to rulers or deities. They were not invented by one of Venice’s geniuses, such as Titian or Vasari; they are no glorification of the city. You might find one in the dark side street leading off from the solemn Doge’s Palace, or next to the tavern where an aperitivo costs only 2.50 euros for Venetians but 8.50 euros for visitors. The gobbe are an integral part of Venice’s cityscape. They were created with in a place’s particular context, out of a necessity they were made to fit into: to fight violence, to preserve hygiene. They have grown with the city and have expanded it, protected it, held it together. At their core, the pissing corners of Venice represent the fusions that make up Venice: time and space, one-sidedness and versatility, defense and inclusion, positive resistance. Their inconspicuous placement and unimpressive exterior carry what holds the city together at its core. The Darkest Corners is an exhibition of sculptures by sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Lena Marie Emrich, developed jointly with curator Marlene A. Schenk. The Darkest Corners, as both an exhibition format and as a series of artworks, uses the city’s nooks, so called gobbe antibandito, to weave the sculptural into Venice, shining a light on an invisible yet always present part of the city. Emrich’s work reinterprets the invisible presence of these gobbe to heighten their structural importance to Venice and highlight a seemingly overlooked part of the city. Within this intervention, the essential meaning of the object is revealed as one of the city’s integral “glues.”