Gaining from the traditions of the Baroque theater and the Fine Arts, Cristiano Volk with the “Sinking Stone” project offers us a reading of the city of Venice that is not satisfied of reporting its artistic and architectural magnificence through a dynamic and wise look, rather seeks for these a formal and postural dialogue able to link as part of a single coherent narrative even the most apparently opposite situation, as the loud and excessive ebb and flow of tourists who invade the lake city every day.
Bringing together ancient and contemporary, referring for one and the other a look and a perspective sensitivity not dissimilar, Volk’s work thinks about the city as a living theatrical scene. A stage in which each element watched is a fragment of a scene from Baroque excesses, a period which the author takes into account also as regards the treatment of color that does not escape its liveliness also thanks to the explicit use of the flash.
Checking its attention through dynamic shots and careful both to the gestures brought by the masses of tourists and to the details of an architectural element, the Venice recreated by Cristiano Volk appears as a Gorgon mask, a vulgar and overwhelming face behind whose impressive movement it is possible to glimpse a void.
Sinking Stone is a modern Vanitas, a project capable of showing and merging both sides of Venice: a city immortalized through its history and tourism, a precarious and unstable island that slowly sinks into the water.
Cristiano Volk is an Italian photographer (Trieste 1987) who lives and works in a small town called Staranzano, in the north-east of Italy. After a short period of study at Spazio Labo’ in Bologna, he worked with artists such as Massimo Mastrorillo and Federico Clavarino. Moreover, he has participated in numerous seminars with Antonio Xoubanova, Ricardo Cases, Anouk Kruithof, Jason Fulford, Max Pinckers, Milo Montelli, Fosi Vegue, Michele Tagliaferri, Martin Kollar and Aleix Plademunt.