Nove Viste: Memories from Venice

Nove Viste (Nine views) is a series of photographs, where various views of the city of Venice, are filling the rooms of an empty house in the historical centre of the island. The light is the only one left to occupy the space and it interjects, like a see through layer, the traces of life left on the walls.

Nove Viste is using cameras obscuras to discuss the disappearance of our city centres, memory (personal and collective), in time. The photographs were in fact realised by creating pin holes on the windows of the house and letting the light project the outside view on the internal walls. This technique very old and pre-dating the invention of photography, is borrowed as a tribute to the work of the Cuban-American artist Abelardo Morell and used here to discuss some of the dynamics that characterise the contemporary island of Venice such as abandonment and depopulation, but common also to other similarly fragile places*.

This is the first collaboration between the two brothers Giovanni and Daniele Sambo and it is part of a wider visual research that they carry on independently on landscape, the representation of inhabited spaces, public space and their relationships with daily life, using video, photography and archival materials.

*The historic insular center of Venice population is declining by half every generation (1951: about 150,000 people, 1983: about 80,000 people, 2023: about 40,000 people).

This exhibition is a part of the Season of Photography 2026 -  a celebration of photography in Scotland running from 1 September – 20 December 2026