Miami University faculty collaborate on international art installation in Venice
Miami University faculty collaborate on international art installation in Venice
Last month, a Venetian palazzo hosted an artwork born at the College of Creative Arts. Convening Stories at the Crossroads is a multi-channel video and sound installation by Professor of Architecture + Interior Design Diane Fellows that uses personal histories and stories gathered in Butler County, Ohio as its point of departure for examining global and intersecting experiences of place and time.
On the evening of Oct. 9th, this work became an immersive cinematic event and live performance in the courtyard of the Palazzo Mora for the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition, held in conjunction with the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
“We had beautiful weather all week, and then, the evening of the performance, soft rain fell,” described Fellows. “As the event began, so did the rain. At the conclusion of Ashley’s performance and that of the film, the rain stopped. In the Palazzo Mora Garden, the experience of the soft rain, the projected film narratives with Ashley’s performance was very beautiful. The atmosphere? Perhaps poetic irony. A wonderfully meaningful remembrance.”
This work began as an interdepartmental collaboration when Associate Professor of Art History Annie Dell’Aria reached out to Fellows about producing something for the Cincinnati region’s 2024 FotoFocus Biennial, whose theme was “Backstories.” Dell’Aria continues to serve as curator for the project, which has grown and expanded since being projected onto the Performing Arts Quad on the Oxford campus as part of FotoFocus last fall. Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre and Director of Dance Ashley Goos has since joined the project as choreographer.
Goos appeared in new video elements in this iterative and expanding work and performed live alongside the projections in Venice. The choreographic process started with inspiration from previous iterations of the work and research, and evolved to serve as a universal language connecting sound and image, different generations, and different continents.
“The backdrop of Venice against the streets and voices of Butler County created a stark juxtaposition. My body served as a bridge between the documented lives and voices on the projections and the temporal reality of the time, place, and space we inhabited in that moment,” said Goos. “It was unforgettable.”
The collaborators described Convening Stories as following a labyrinthine trail through local and personal histories, challenging both the presumed “town/gown” separation between our institutions of higher education and the regions in which they are situated and the parochial assumptions of so-called “fly-over country” through the multiple global and international threads woven through its stories. Water, a motif that threads throughout the work and features prominently in the Myaamia stories that bracket the narrative, serves as a formal and thematic bridge to the cityscape of Venice.
In discussing some of the inspiration for the spatial presentation of the work, Dell’Aria cited the nineteenth-century philosopher and engineer Charles Babbage who once theorized that every human utterance leaves an atomic trace on particles in the air, making our very atmosphere a vast archive of history that could be played back and analyzed. “Through video and sound that spreads through public space in the night,” she writes, “Convening Stories attempts to simulate such an experience of atmosphere and history.”
