The Immersive Grand Palais is devoting its next exhibition to Venice. The opportunity to virtually immerse yourself in the history of a city with such a particular identity and to once again sound the alarm about its survival.
If 25 million tourists come to Venice every year, few of them know its history. The Immersive Grand Palais wishes to fill in their gaps through its new digital exhibition, “Venice revealed”. It offers visitors an unprecedented exploration of behind the scenes of the Italian city, the invention of which is miraculous.
Venice was built on an archipelago of a hundred small islands, at the bottom of the Adriatic Gulf. Most were swampy and unsanitary until a reclamation program made them habitable. This surprising location, in the shape of a cul-de-sac, is subject to major variations in the water level due to the tides. Hence the phenomena of acqua alta (“high water”) which regularly cause flooding of the city of the Doges.
The “Venice Revealed” exhibition unveils the foundations of this city-state in four chapters, which combine historical chronology and wandering through major sites such as Saint Mark’s Square, its Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. Throughout the route, visitors can discover images offering completely new points of view of these emblematic Venetian places. They are all extracted from a massive 3D model made using drones by the Iconem team in 2021, which reconstructs, thanks to photogrammetry technology, the entire city in volume.
“Photogrammetry works according to the following principle: a 3D model is developed from a multitude of digital photographs of a subject, captured from all possible angles. For a simple object, it suffices to turn around, while, for an architecture, it is necessary to multiply the shots both outside – most often using a drone – and inside, room by room.Finally, for an entire city, it is necessary to combine shots from the ground, i.e. in the streets, and aerial shots, by drone or plane. If this project required the implementation of each of these techniques, it has It was also necessary to resort to shooting by boat, in order to document in detail the facades of palaces which are not visible otherwise, in particular those of the Grand Canal”, explains Yves Ubelmann, the president of Iconem.
Venice, “a city of the future”
This virtual universe recomposes with great precision the urban space, but also the architecture of the multiple palaces that house the Serenissima as well as the details of the paintings that are hidden there. This digital material allows us to take a new look at the thousand-year-old city, as explained by Gabriella Belli, honorary director of the Fondazione musei civici di Venezia and general curator of the exhibition.
“Far from being just a city-museum, Venice is above all a city of the future at the forefront of contemporary issues. The incomparable immersion generated by the completely new images of the digital exhibition ‘Venice Revealed’ will allow us to feel and understand like never before the richness and complexity of this extraordinary city,” she said in a statement.
This immersion in the soul of Venice is facilitated by the soundtrack mixing acoustic instruments, electronics and sound design, which the musician David Chalmin composed for the exhibition. It accompanies visitors to the Immersive Grand Palais throughout their journey to the heart of the birthplace of Gianantonio Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Bernardo Bellotto. Their stroll will end with an interactive walk through 15th century Venice, a model created by Ubisoft based on models from the video game “Assassin’s Creed II”.
“Venice revealed” is to be discovered from September 21, 2022 to February 19, 2023 at the Immersive Grand Palais in Paris, at 112 rue de Lyon in the 12th arrondissement.