Paolo Cesaretti and Antonella Dedini - on the occasion of the XIII Venice Biennale - present a work investigating the nature of the citiy and the cognitive relationship involving citizens with the urban space.

The Irrational City is a light installation that dominates the courtyard of Palazzo Bembo, a scale model replica of the project planned for the Santa Lucia Station. The Irrational City rises questions about Venice. In this city, what is irrational? The rigid flows of tourists or the uprising flow of water? The project site - Santa Lucia Station - is the urban junction where the forced adaptation of two opposite systems - the contemporary time of the mainland and the suspended time of the laguna - makes the contemporary logic intruding in a physical unaltered structure.

The symbolic reference is the Pythagorean idea of numbers being the essence of everything or, more precisely, that the principles of mathematics are also the principles of the entire reality. Permanence and immutability are key features of such a scenario where every shape is an expression of a number.

Venice, with its fixed border line in space and time, is definitively Pythagorean. Here the overlapping element of modernity creates a short circuit that could admit to be represented only by an irrational number. π, the first letter of περίμετρος (perimetros), meaning 'measure around' in greek, is an homage to this extra-ordinary city.

Event XIII Biennale di Venezia, Common Ground
Exhibition Traces Of Centuries & Future Steps, Palazzo Bembo