The Serenissima of the South Coast

This photographic project was inspired and informed by two significant influences: The writer (and University Teacher) W.G. Sebald and the American land artist, Robert Smithson. 

I became interested in Smithson’s work for a short time at Art School, particularly enjoying the discovery that Smithson had produced - alongside his famous monumental art work - Spiral Jetty -  many avant-garde and experimental written works. The one that immediately sparked my imagination was his article entitled A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. which was published in Artforum magazine in 1967. 

Passaic was Robert Smithson’s hometown. The article describes a journey and a walking-tour of Passaic, that Smithson took with his camera one day in September that year. Taking photos of the various mundane buildings and objects - a bridge, water pipes, a sandbox - photos which were then included within the text, with irony Smithson analyses the unmonumental nature of his home town and at one point asks the question: “Has Passaic replaced Rome as the new Eternal City?” 

This in turn has led me to ask: Has Portsmouth replaced Venice as the new Serenissima?

Referring now to my other muse, the writer W.G. Sebald, who wrote extensively (one might say obsessively) around the idea of European post-imperial decline and the attendant social and psychological catastrophes that have been contingent upon this decline, the comparison between Portsmouth and Venice might be better understood. The power and wealth of the Venetian empire, built upon the strength and domination of the Venetian fleet in the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas has in its decline yielded to the world this totem of melancholy, artistic inspiration: home to a wealth of museums, historic churches, restaurants, cafes and contemporary art-galleries. The great culturefest of the Venice Biennale is held within Venice’s very own equivalent of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, the Arsenale di Venezia.

From this point of view, I wondered if perhaps in five hundred years’ time, the spiritual home of Britain’s naval power, and cornerstone of the British empire, might also become a melancholic museum capital of British cultural history surrounded by the sea? The foundations are in place: the Mary Rose and HMS Victory, the Palmerston Forts, the Guildhall. With global warming threatening an ever rising sea-level, perhaps in those years to come, the residents of Portsmouth too might even need to experience the wellies and duck-boards of acqua alta, much as the residents of Venice do today.

Introduction by the artist

Images of the exhibition