VENICE CARNIVAL PHOTOSHOOT:

LA PORTA DELLE FIABE (THE FAIRIE GATE OF VENICE)

UN VIAGGIO NEL TEMPO (A TRAVEL IN TIME)

Time travel couple:
Time Travelers Cluj

Many thanks for the precious help during the portrait photosession
to the architect Giovanni Bellanca
and styling and creative soul Karolina Kamenska
of Structures of Venice.

Looking into the mysteries of Venice, La Porta delle Fiabe or The Fairie Gate of Venice, is its gateway to travel in time.

This gate looks apparently closed but it is possible to cross, being allowed to the Epochs.
Actually, The Fairie Gate of Venice may also be really closed, but only for those who believe so. In this case it is even possible to touch a real brick barrier guarding the access, and this is how all the the rushing persons perceive the gate, assuming they at least notice it.

There are three conditions to acknowledge the reality about the gate and cross its threshold:
1) Your personal belief in the truth: la Porta delle Fiabe is open.
2) Owning a Time Machine. It is extremely important to keep under control the capabilities floating in the fairy side of the Gate. Be careful! Don’t try to travel in an Epoch without a time machine with a well tuned bias. It could be dangerous.
3) A soul filled with love and respect for Venice, and your feelings have to influence your acts and decisions. The Fairie Gate of Venice always perceives your mood and knows your works, holding the decision about opening its way or not.

Just allowed to cross the Fairie Gate of Venice you will perceive The Epochs and choose one.

La Porta delle Fiabe di Venezia

Other images taken before to cross the Gate:

Everything was ok with choosing the Epoch, and the same was for the time travel couple I met.
You can see them while activating a cycloidal energy ring with their sword cane at the beginning of their experience (the same happened at the end).
I would like to let you know that we are so grateful to The Fairie Gate of Venice for allowing this photoshoot.

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Now, an explanation about the editing: it is cancrizans.

“Cancrizans” is Latin and means a retrograde course of action. It is from the word “cancer”, which is the crab.
Following this concept, the first image of the sequence can become the last.
I mean, the editing has two opposite reading directions, one is straigh, the second is retrograde (the upper slideshow follow this second option).

This Latin title was used by Johann Sebastian Bach when naming his music.
J.S. Bach composed some two-ways direction compositions.

This way to compose is also called Table Music: you can imagine a piece of music placed on a table in between two musicians. They both read the same score but in opposite directions.
Bach’s Canon Cancrizans shows a single voice composition whose beginning joins with the end.
The simultaneous performance of the deeply related forward and backward paths gives life to the two voices composition.

Unbelievable Epoch, Venice was ours.

Our travel in time took place in a really particular situation: Venice offered us incredible wide free spaces for framing.
We did not imagine that a such travel could take place.

Living around 1830, my couple was very curious to experience the art of photography.
They had already heard about the recent chemical but artistic invention, but photographies were extremely rare and they had never seen any before, despite they were used to pose for paintings.
This is why they decided to travel in a so far future through the Porta delle Fiabe and meet a full time artist “who paints using the light”, a “photographer”.

So, you now understand why this fable exists.
As for me, coming from XXI Century, my gear was digital. Not sure they fully comprehended my summary explanation about “digital”, but trust me, they were really excited by my ability to immediately show their figures in the camera screen!

Time Travelers Cluj in Venice. Carnival photoshoot.

Did you know that Venice has a real relationship with time travels?
I had the privilege to attend three times at classes with Padre Pellegrino Ernetti O.S.B. when I was young, and I also remember a physicist of his circle.
Being a monk of the Benedectine monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Ernetti also taught Gregorian Chant at the conservatory, was the internationally renowned exorcist of the Venetian Patriarchate and a quantum subatomic physics expert, collaborator of the physics laboratory of the Catholic University of Sacred Heart of Milan.
When Padre Pellegrino affirmed to be the inventor of the Chronovisor, this quickly became an international breaking news who involved the Vatican’s censorship.
Wikipedia says about:

"In the early 1960s, Ernetti began to study the writings of François Brune, himself a Roman Catholic priest and author. Ernetti allegedly ended up helping Brune construct the machine as members of a team which included twelve world-famous scientists. He identified two of them as Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. The Chronovisor was described as a large cabinet with a cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. It could also locate and track specific individuals. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events. It could also pick up the audio component or sound waves emitted by these same events."

Still alive, living in Venice and owner of an art shop in Calle de l’Ogio, Luciano Buggio is also a physician and founder of the Scuola di Fisica Giordano Bruno.
Amongst its theories there is one about recovering energy waves (which means: “from the past”).
Prof. Buggio is considered a “heretic” physician and he is aware of this, but his studies are serious and documented.

So now, don’t you think that Venice is a really suitable location to travel in time?

No people around. It was the most evident peculiarity of the Epoch.

We saw lights at the windows and inhabited houses, but something separated us from all the inhabitants.
It was impressive, not easy to explain. You can try thinking to a surreal situation in which an imaginary danger, such as a collective belief in pandemic alarm accepted as true, induced all to stay at home and we were the only people not scared and not believing that.

Did you already know? The two-way reading concept that I used for this tale is not only coming from music, indeed, it has remote roots: Mose’s Torah.
Yes! It also works in this way.
The Torah – composed of the five first books of the “Bible” – is an extremely complicated intersection of words and numerical values, in which the linear text creates other words and phrases at equal intervals of letters.
This phenomena is improperly known as “the Bible Code”, but the right scientific name is ELS, or Equidistant Letter Sequences.

The most evident sequence is the one starting from the first T (“tav” in Hebrew) of the text.
Always keeping the fifth letter we find the letters spelling “TORAH”.
This happens in first two of the five books.
The third book is the centre.
The fourth and fifth books have the same letters interval but inverted: “HAROT”, that is Torah backwards.

Coming back to Bach, he used another Latin title in one of his compostition: Quaerendo Invenietis, or “seek, and you shall find”.
Not only the Torah, but whole Bible works in this way.
Quaerendo Invenietis can be also considered the motto for La Porta delle Fiabe.

Venetian night landscape in the Vedutisti style.

My time travel couple pointed out how Venice at night was completely redesigned by the massive use of artificial light. In our ages this is normal and we rather pay attention to the opposite, when there is a blackout, but they were almost stunned looking at a “second Venice” redesigned by the effect of its street light.

“This Venice looks like a Capriccio” – they said – “The architects who projected it couldn’t ever had an idea of its look with a so whimsical lighting!”.
I was going to reply that I already exposed the same theory in Instagram on March 2019, but I should have explained to a XIX century couple what Instagram or socials are… it also came to my mind that I should have explained what a smartphone is, so I let it go, saying my best and shorter “Yes, really!” 🙂

Carnival photoshoot in Venice, a couple of time travelers.

My couple came from 1830s, I was… “me”, and we lived our experience in a floating mixture of their past and my ages.
La Porta delle Fiabe di Venezia is charismatic. This gate is not limited to travel in a fixed historical period, it can also blend two or more of them, creating unexpected architectural mixtures.
You can see the unbelievable if you know how to reach the storage rooms for creation surpluses.

I well remember how pleasant was the privilege to clearly hear the lapping sound of the Venetian water as the strongest sound.
No other, except the sound of our steps and and the clicks of my camera.
Surreal experience, the only people we saw were rowing gondoliers in the canals. We did not met other Venetians at all.

Gondoliers existed at work in our Epoch just because Venice must have gondolas.
The Epoch make them at work, and they looked like Elves leading giant ghost black swans.
I think that gondoliers did not see nor hear us at all.

Very refined interiors settled up with an evident avant-garde taste from my couple’s home.

While I had the impression that all the houses in the city were close to my days, their home interiors were clearly set in XIX Century.
I also had the privilege to admire their fine collection of baroque paintings from different renewed authors, including a portrait of an anonymous musician represented with a clump of red hair peeping out from under his wig. We had fun and I started to call this musician “Il Signor Vivaldi”, explaining them who was the forgotten figure of the Red Priest, il Prete Rosso.
This is why this portrait is nowadays internationally famous for being “del Vivaldi”.

Del Vivaldi. Venetian interiors.

My client Olivier was a British war veteran. He fought around Europe in different wars against a little tyrant whose name isn’t relevant.
Coming from the city that his contemporary Venetians called Clausemburgo, he then settled in Venice, living there with his lovely wife Alina.

They apologized with me for the external aspect of their home, but this fact is completely understandable. Leaping forward by almost two hundred years, the external palter was affected by ages, and you remember from my previous post how fine were their interiors.

Nowadays the place that hosts their front door is a famous Venetian spot, thanks to the modern “Instagramers” and some films, as Death in Venice.
Maybe, one day, you will be the one to take the picture here. That day, please, remember yourself that once upon a time Alina and Olivier the Time Travelers lived here during their most beautiful days.

Sotoportego de la Malvasia Vecchia. My couple's home.

Tuning the bias of the time machine.
This machine is very rare, and precious of course. It is stored in a historical palace on the Canal Grande called Ca’ d’Oro (the Golden House).
Some time ago the time machine was also part of an exhibit of La Biennale di Venezia, but disguised as an important art installation. Its true nature of time machine was not revealed to the public.

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[Out of our fable, the contemporary art installation in the image is Maarten Baas’ ‘Real Time XL The Artist’.
It was part of Dysfunctional, an exhibit opened in 2019 during the Venice Biennale at the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti, Ca’ d’Oro]

Maarten Baas’ ‘Real Time XL The Artist’. Dysfunctional, 2019, Galleria Giorgio Franchetti, Ca’ d’Oro.

La Porta delle Fiabe creates Epochs. Every Epoch has different features, and you can meet other time travelers, as I did with this couple.
For example, the instant documented here happened both at the beginning and at the end of this fable.

Yes, you got it right. When we perceived that it was time to go out of the Epoch, we unexpectedly lived again the same situation happened at the beginning of our adventure.

Our Epoch traced a circle, not a thread, between the beginning and end of the story. Just as a circle on the clock. The perception of this cannot be understood unless you experience it.
Being conscious to be both at the end and at the beginning of our pleasant adventure, we chose to relive it all, but in a backwards direction. This doesn’t usually happens while traveling with a time machine, The Fairie Gate of Venice creates these opportunities.

The Time Travelers Cluj in Venice.

By briefly summarising at  the conclusion of our tale, La Porta delle Fiabe di Venezia is a tale with images, and its editing has both a straight and an inverse reading key.
This means that you can invert the reading order of the images without affecting their narrative quality, including the sense of the text.
This image can be both the and the beginning of the sequence, and if you look at the initial slideshow, you will find the images exposed in the inverse direction.

You know that I put a lot of work into the editing and this two-way reading work was for me both fun, learning, and a challenge. That’s just Instagram, for which the editing was initially created: you can look at the feed starting from upside down (which means from the most recent post) or chronologically (starting from below).
Instagramers are accustomed to consider every feed from the most recent image, but the normal way of reading should be the opposite.

Are you interested in experimenting with photography language?
It consists to give a chronological reading to some high-quality Instagram feeds, which means starting from below.
You will find out about the authors’ creative path over the years. It is a true photography lesson!

Venetian labyrinth by night.

Extra content

Last image taken before to leave the Epoch, while it was dissolving:

Epilogue

Did you read all our fairy tale? I hope you like it!
I hope so, and, maybe… are you a Mask too?
Let’s get in touch. We can meet in Venice, crossing together La Porta delle Fiabe and write a new tale together, embracing a new Epoch!

My prices for a complete fine art photoshoot start from € 780,oo.
My promise for you is: our work will not a mere question of booking a professional photographer and pose. We can plan, dream and create together, having fun, also improvising as actors of the Commedia dell’Arte, believing together that Venice is Mother of the Arts, the Poetry, and the Flair.
I am ready to live these adventures with the enthusiasm and the simple hearth of the artist.
Let’s create together!