Emilia and Ilya Kabakov: Diario veneziano

“Diario veneziano” is a participatory project by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in which approximately 500 residents of Venice – across generations, social contexts, and urban areas – were invited to write a diary entry about their relationship with the city and to lend a personal object capable of representing it. The result is a collective self-portrait of Venice assembled from fragments of lives, memories, and desires: traces of everyday existence that, brought together, form what the curators describe as a map of feeling.

The collected objects are displayed in a series of thematic vitrines alongside the personal accounts of their owners, functioning as what the Kabakovs call “resonance chambers” of individual existences. In keeping with their concept of “total installation,” the experience is immersive rather than purely visual, a space in which the individual and the universal intertwine. The project is not an exhibition about Venice but one made with Venice, proceeding from the conviction that the city’s social and affective complexity can only be rendered from within, through the voices of those who inhabit it.

Presented three years after the death of Ilya Kabakov, the project is installed across two venues: the Piano Nobile of Ca’ Tron, transformed into a large narrative device, and the Padiglione Venezia at the Giardini, where “Diario veneziano” enters into dialogue with “Note persistenti”, the broader exhibition curated for the pavilion.