Migropolis: Venice /Atlas of a Global Situation

In winter 2006, under the aegis of philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, a collective of students from theIUAV University in Venice (including Experientia collaborator Miguel Cabanzo) fanned out to subject the city of Venice, Italy to a process of forensic structural mapping.

Out of this field work, conducted in the Situationist tradition, there developed a three-year urban project that produced an enormous archive comprising tens of thousands of photographs, case studies, movement profiles, and statistic data.

In this archive, Venice, the place of longing at the junction of three migration corridors, emerges as a front-line European city and an exemplary prototype of the increasingly globalized city in which a decimated inner-city population meets armies of tourists and a parallel economy supported by illegal immigrants.

In a map cleverly branching out into essays, visual arguments, data visualizations, and interviews, the globalized territory of Venice is microscopically dissected and defined as an urban metaphor: the city becomes an “atlas of a global situation.”

Migropolis is two things in one: A survey on the global city using the urban territory of Venice as an exemplary paradigm that makes it possible to anticipate urban escalations to come. And: An experimental investigation of the means and measures of the spectacle to find out if visual media allow an understanding of society.

Migropolis is a book consisting of two volumes, a series of exhibitions and this webpage as a tool that will continuously be updated.

The book

Migropolis
Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation
Wolfgang Scheppe & the IUAV Class on Politics of Representation

Essays by Giorgio Agamben, Valeria Burgio and Wolfgang Scheppe
Foreword by Angela Vettese

1,344 pp., 2078 ills., 17 x 24 cm, hardcover, 2 volumes in slipcase
2009, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern

Buy the book: from the publisher / on Amazon

The exhibition

Migropolis
Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation
Wolfgang Scheppe & the IUAV Class on Politics of Representation

Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
Comune di Venezia

Galleria di Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy
October 8 – December 6, 2009
10:30 – 17:30
Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays