Carnival of Venice 2014

THE WONDERFUL AND THE FANTASTIC OF NATURE

A CARNIVAL OF FAIRYTALES – THE FANTASTIC FOREST

The Carnival of the fairy, the wonderful and the fantastic. The Carnival of fantasy and of nature.



A global Carnival because every culture has drawn, since its origins, from the wealth of fantasy and fairytales, as narrative metaphors of life.

A modern Carnival because the the naturalistic fairy is the way we can face, in the celebrations, the profound issues of the relationship between humankind and the environment: forests, valleys, seas, mountains, lagoons and the mysterious creatures, plants and animals, that inhabit them.

Everyone knows the man’s need to tell the mysterious–naturalistic through fairytales. The worldwide cultures, firstly in the form of myths, then in that of an anthropized nature of which so much is in the world fairytale tradition, unfold an infinite reservoir of symbols and characters around the creation and origin of life, the atmospheric elements, the plants and the animal creatures.

East and West, Asia and Oceania, the Americas and Europe, Africa: in the fairytale Carnival you will search for masks inspired by the historical fairytales of the European tradition, by the Arab and Middle Eastern short stories, by the votive symbols of the cultures of Africa and Mesoamerica, by the allegories of the Indians, Mongolians, and the ancient Catay.

The objective will be to stimulate the public of the Carnival to rediscover, with individual and urban disguises, the importance of the fantastic, popular and cultured, esoteric and didactic, in its relationship between humankind and the environment. Venice is, as everyone knows, a miracle of imagination in itself. A fish in the lagoon, the point of intersection of Alpine cultures on the one hand, the infinite wilderness of the waters where galleys wend incessantly to and from Egypt, on the other hand. The city was the interface between East and West, where myths – and fears – of overseas monstrous and incredible creatures, were translated into narrative, paintings, architectural decorations, before being exported to Europe along the canals and roads frequented by merchants.

Nature and its fruits can find, in the Carnival of Venice, a new relevance in the classical mythological characters of the cultures, in nymphs and Nereids, as in the modern inventions, of which the fantastic literature blossomed again in recent years documents the strong attraction in contemporary fairytales.

In Venice, the Carnival 2014 will be represented by a huge dictionary of fantasy: each mask will become a symbolic material trace of an extraordinary meeting of space with time, where in our history, one or more human beings have conceived a myth, and have made of it image and narrative. A dictionary of the timeless fantastic, a huge morphological map of human creativity free from constraints and happy to explore nature and its mysteries, to be enhanced with shapes, sounds and attitudes, free to travel in the heads of our ancestors as in those of our children.

For the city of Venice, for its numerous cultural institutions, this is an opportunity to contextualize the presence of the fantastic in the territory of the Veneto region and the lagoon: from the woods Cansiglio to the peaks of the Alps, from the gardens and orchards of the Garda to the lagoon valleys, from the islands of the overseas East to the Fondaci of Armenians, Turks and Greeks. A world of fairytales enhanced by the scents and flavors of the foreigners, grown up in the secret sounds of the languages that merchants brought from the East and from northern Europe, documented in the languages ​​of the Princes and of the travellers who undertook the long journey to Venice, the master of civilization.



For more information

http://www.carnevale.venezia.it