NATASCHA NIEDERSTRASS
RUINENLUST
SEPTEMBER 28 TO NOVEMBER 9, 2024
ARTIST RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2024
2 P.M. TO 6 P.M.
The body of work, Ruinenlust, explores a curious psychopathology of being drawn to what we fear most. We don’t simply stumble upon ruins, we seek them out to linger among their tottering forms—the great broken rhythm of collapsing vaults, truncated columns, crumbling plinths—and savor the thrill of decline and fall, of destabilised wholeness. Natascha Niederstrass’s new exhibition addresses this fascination with decay and the morbid while also eliciting a post-romantic imaginary of ruined space in relation to its history. This work focuses specifically on the uninhabited island of Poveglia, located in the Venetian Lagoon, which has recently gained worldwide fame as the most haunted island in the world.
Niederstrass also examines through this corpus, the way in which this narrative has rebounded on the island, attracting followers of the paranormal. Behind a seemingly trivial narrative, the in-between or transitory state of the ghosts (conceived as cultural objects capable of activating an emotional sphere that goes beyond the rational understanding of places) allows to conceptualize the discontinuities of time and space, the disconnection between vernacular and academic cultures and the classic dichotomies attributed to island spaces. The case of Poveglia shows how ghosts can shape the way in which narratives are told and reveals how our desire to mythologize reality transcends historical facts.
The materiality of the abandoned island and the dynamics of a partial return to wilderness, the degradation of unmaintained buildings has reduced some structures to the state of vestiges that have been progressively invaded by vegetation. This process has given the place an aura of impermeability, darkness and mystery, especially when compared to the highly domesticated and urban Venetian landscape. The case of Poveglia shows how ghosts, desired and perceived by different actors as metaphors, presences, absences, liminal entities or even as easy sensationalist bait, respond to a need to appropriate reality in order to transport it into the world of myths and thus give oneself the impression of a certain hold on the reality that escapes us.
It is in this perspective that the island of Poveglia perfectly embodies the Gothic aesthetic, evoking this fear of the ravages of time as well as that of the claustrophobic feeling of confinement in space. The cultural clichés that tend to conceive of insularity as a metaphor for death and mystery have been reinforced in this case by the backdrop of Venice, a city that prides itself on its narrative of decadence. In this sense, it is also impossible to deny the paradigm according to which Venice has been seen and perceived since the 19th century as a city whose decline is inevitable. Its macabre decline and flamboyant death have contributed to building the myth that surrounds it, thus attracting a staggering number of tourists who come every year to see it die. By putting into dialogue imagination and reality, official history and vernacular narratives, then sources of expert knowledge and their popular reception, Niederstrass attempts to understand the haunted narrative of the island of Poveglia and the lagoon that bathes it.