My dear Friend Manfred Manera will open soon his gallery-shop in Venice, if you are in that beautiful city check it out!
Press Release
Opening of "The Merchant of Venice " Gallery 07/05/2011 at 6 P.M.
Campo Sant'Angelo 3579 , Venice
( An initiative of the Venetian Multiversal Academy*)
On the 7th of May 2011 in the heart of Venice, in campo Sant Angelo, "The Merchant of Venice " Gallery will be
inaugurated as a space devoted to the renaissance of the ancient tradition of the Venetians merchants and with the aim of
bringing back Venice to its historical role of capital of the silk roads of which, the maritime city , had always been its most
western outpost. " The Merchant of Venice " Gallery, after Shakespeare play , will show the textile art collected by the
Venetian traveler Manfred Manera, who, since many years is following the steps of the Venetians Merchants in Asia, and
samples of traditional textile art from the silk roads of which the production is still alive and has survived at the impact of
industrial globalization. It will be a space devoted to the art of the Merchant in a Ruskian sense." To buy and sell is not only
a mercantile action, but also a moral one. From here the imperative for the buyer never to encourage exploitation which
mutilate or the monotony which corrupts."
The Gallery will be focused on textile art for its essential symbolic message and ornamental value, for its being a-
conceptual. In our always more virtual world, textile art has the great value of launching an appeal to come back to senses.
Textile art is in-fact essentially a tactile art: carpets, textiles, velvets are made to be caressed, touched; they are not just a
concept, an idea. The sensuality of this art melts harmoniously with the esthetics and cromatic tradition inherited from the
Venetian civilization.
The " Merchant of Venice " will offer also a space for conferences, book launches, documentaries projections and
photographic exhibitions about the silk roads. It will stage shows of contemporary artists who in their work explore the
borders between anonymous, traditional art and individualistic art in the western sense. Artist who are also artisans
according to the definition given by the philosopher Elemire Zolla : " An artist is a craftsman who experiences coincidences,
feeling of "deja vu...", during his activity") Artists who, positioned between two world, the Orient and the West, are
following Goethe's call to merge the best elements of each reality.
Last but not least, fundamental aim of the new space in Sant'Angelo will be on one side to oppose the progressive
desertification of the urban texture of Venice in the process of being suffocated by the overflow of international luxury
brands which have the tendency to standardize most of the historical centers of Europe, and, on the other, to resist the
invasion of cheap souvenirs often produced by sweat shops, if not by veritable slaves of our times. The intention is to
prevent Venice from becoming very soon one more alienating " Shopping Mall" as those which are mushrooming in the
megalopolis of the contemporary world.
The Merchant of Venice gallery will be a lively source of resistance to the desertification and standardization of our planet
and of human activities.
* The Venetian Multiversal Academy is a no-profit organization founded in Vienna in 2007 by the Journalist, Manfred
Manera and the philosopher Richard Weihe with the aim to sustain the biodiversity of human activities.
