60 minutes | Two-channel projection video | Dimensions variable

Death in venice

Death in venice is a site-specific installation that situates the artist’s queer body at the centre of various translations and adaptations of Thomas Mann’s queer-coded novella “Death in Venice” (1912).

Surrounding the room are floor-to-ceiling hand-dyed grey drapes, while in the centre of the room are two 4 x 8 foot plexi-glass sheets supported in metal frames. The plexi-sheets are illuminated with back projection, and this is the only light in the gallery. There are two projected videos that loop continuously throughout the day: the horizontal video projection is a selection of frames from the ending of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and the vertical video projection is a deep-fake video of my own facial movements that have been merged with the Aschenbach character’s face from Visconti’s film. The former video is silent, except for a slow and melodic version of Mahler’s fifth symphony, which was featured prominently in Visconti’s film; the second video, however, is a series of short speeches, which contain texts from various translations and adaptations of Death in Venice – from Mann’s novella, to Visconti’s film, to Britten’s opera, and several quotes which academics claim inspired the original novel.

A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind. 

I remember having an hourglass at my father’s house. The aperture through which the sand runs is so tiny that first it seems as if the level in the upper glass never changes. To our eyes it appears the sand runs out only at the end. 

You who have looked at beauty with your own eyes have already given up to death. Suck the poison from the air with every breath and smell the death from every flower. You who have looked at beauty with your own eyes have already faded away like spring. 

We are enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities where we hold an image of beauty that shows us the truth between mortality and immortality. 

It seemed to him the pale and lovely summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though, with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation.

And, as so often before, I rose to follow.

Script of the deep-fake video merging Paluzzi’s face with Aschenbach