The contemporary art galleries are valves that channel the time in which we live and anticipate the one we will live in soon, because their clocks are always fast. Otherwise Venice is a city full of chasms, trapdoors, and wells that make you plunge deep into the past.

Don’t you see them? They’re everywhere. Behind every corner, there’s a church; cross a bridge, there’s another palazzo; further on a museum waits. These places invite you to cross their thresholds; you enter, and in a flash you’re in another age. Even the names of a calle or a campiello, if read well, can tell you their story – fabulous, ferocious, or funny as it might be. But it too belongs to the past, it hypnotizes you like a time machine made of words.

The whole city is full of vortices that suck you into distant points, into the life that went on before us. Walking around Venice means being absorbed by centuries past, to be set down at different levels of temporal depth: Gothic, Renaissance, the 18th century… The generations that preceded us planted irresistible traps that still work perfectly. It’s good to let yourself be caught. But in a city like this, perhaps more than any other, someone has to make the present flow, invent it and prefigure the future. The contemporary art galleries pursue this vital task: renewing time, ensuring the health of an organism that would otherwise be made of just legacy, monuments, solidified memories, and too often their crass sale as souvenirs and trinkets.

The contemporary art galleries give what’s new and unpredictable, what hasn’t yet been, a chance. They pursue it passionately and freely; they help it spring forth. This map invites you to discover the sources brimming over with the days to come. Try to follow it. Discover the unexpected.

Tiziano Scarpa