VIULife - Photographs for a Birthday
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Venice International University has celebrated its 10th anniversary. Since activities started in December 1995, we have aimed at developing a research and training project that goes beyond straightforward curricular activities, by creating a space for interaction between different cultures and means of communication. Over the years our activities have multiplied.
Besides the undergraduate program, which is open to students from the various universities that are part of the consortium, today Venice International University is home to research and training structures that have asserted themselves on the international scene: the TEDIS center, for themes regarding competitivity and economic globalization, and the TEN Center, for themes regarding the economy of the environment.
In these ten years, we have never failed to underline certain key characteristics. Venice International University aims at consolidating a top-quality academic curriculum with an experience of creativity and participation that is often lacking in Italian universities. The cultural and artistic activities that Venice International University promotes constitute a privileged meeting space for people coming from extremely different cultural backgrounds.
Venice International University is an international institution, but not an “extraterritorial” project. The international character of the program develops around an interaction between the city and the territory. The Radar Project, of which this publication is an appendix, is a clear example of this interaction: Radar wanted to connect contemporary artists and Venice through the language of visual arts, to enable the city to be looked at and reinvented with new eyes. The billboards which have given color to the worksite hoardings of Insula for the last two years have shown a different image of everyday life in Venice, playing with passion and irony on some of the clichés that mark our city’s life.
We asked Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, two Bulgarian artists who have already worked in Venice for the Radar project, to capture the route we have undertaken in a few snapshots. There is irony in these images; there is a classic taste for shots and a good dose of complicity with those photographed. There is also passion for what professors, staff and students do every day, and also a lot of entertainment. Missirkov and Bogdanov have captured a way of working and enjoying the research and learning experience that Venice International University pursues with persistency. Those photos are now hanging in the corridors and lecture halls of our University, as a reminder of the profound link between amusement and intellectual discovery, between learning and participation, between passion and identity. I am sure that these images will always be able to remind us how much innovation depends on our own ability – individual or collective – to renew the image we have of ourselves.
Stefano Micelli
Dean of Venice International University
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