Migropolis represents with images and statistics the social and geographical consequences of globalization in the particular Venetian territory. The research shows the contradiction of the city: richness and poverty, massive tourism and the escape of inhabitants. From 8th October to 6th December at the Galleria di Piazza San Marco.

Migropolis is a large scale project concerned with the transversality of an urban territory subjected to the conditions of globalization.
The term globalization is misused in a societal consensus where it prospers as a pretentious gnosis still being a mere void abstraction.
The Migropolis-project lays open the system of globalization by the means of a concrete, minute and tangible exposure of global structures on a confined urban territory.
The practices to achieve this are the result of a detournement: reapplying the affirmative modes and visual techniques of a society of the spectacle in a discursive way.

It is the metropolitan area of Venice that is empirically investigated as a complex and paradox paradigm being exceptionally exposed to change caused by a worldwide connectivity, reference and interdependence of predominant values in economy and culture.

The project's aim is to develop visual strategies for outlining the structures of Migropolis based on the territory of Venice, that acts due to its excessive numbers of tourists and immigrants as an anticipatory model of globalization.
In the pervasive society of the spectacle, one encounters an almost absolute hegemony of the fictionalized image.
Reflecting this, the project attempts to visually represent identifiable phenomena in the city of migration with new cognitive methods in photography, data visualization and image-based technologies.
The focus is on the representation of discoursive - as opposed to persuasive - acts of visual communication.
This specific methodical approach is based on an epistemological doubt in the cognitive properties of visualization within the context of a performative system of images, as being in use in a society whose public consensus is established through the rhetorics of imagery.
The collaborators tried to explore the options and tecniques of a visual language within a societal iconographic infrastructure that is aimed to pictorial affirmation.
The mediatized culture is based on fictionalization as a means of image-production.
The project instead tries to develop a new access to a practice of the discoursive image. This practice is going to be established in all genres of visual communication: notational systems as used for displaying quantitative data.

Mapping and cartography as used for motion patterns of trade and tribes. Photography as used for displaying qualitative data and case studies.
And a graphic treatment for the representation of psychogeographic analyses of the territory in question.
The subject of the theory and practice related to MIGROPOLISTM is the visualization of the traces of migration in an urban context.
The scope of the project involves at least three categorical forms of migrational entities found in the urban area of the survey: migration as a conflict zone, where wealth-based and poverty-based formations of mobility meet, as seen in the flux of tourism and the presence of legal –immigration; migration of commodities, products and services as a result of liberalization and deregulation in international trade, movement of capital and integration of financial markets; migration of the image, as observed in the global distribution, dislocation and displacement of iconographic tropes of historic Venice.

The first project phase started in winter 2006, established the theoretical foundation of this intention and produced an array of more than 1200 pages with notational systems, complex mapping systems, case studies and photographic archives.
The photographic archive alone contains more than 60,000 images.

The second project phase in 2008 resulted in a methodical structure to organize and display the results in a syntagma of mapping.

Curators: Wolfgang Scheppe, Veronica Bellei, Katerina Dolejsova, Nera Kelava

Coordination: Katerina Dolejsova

Exhibition Design and Production: Veronica Bellei, Katerina Dolejsova, Nera Kelava, Marie Letz

Concept: Nera Kelava