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The house partners with the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation for a Biennale project where moving image, architecture, and public space meet after dark
Venice is already a city of projections. Light moves across water, buildings double themselves in canals, and history seems to appear and disappear depending on where you stand. For the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, Bottega Veneta is leaning into that instability with a new partnership that turns the city itself into a screen.
The Italian house is exclusively supporting If All Time Is Eternally Present, a collateral event presented by the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation. Curated by Chiara Carrera and Marta Barina, the exhibition brings together moving image works by Kandis Williams, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, and Tai Shani, staged on the façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin in Campo Manin.
Rather than placing contemporary art inside a conventional gallery, the project unfolds outdoors, at night, in the middle of the city. From May 9 to June 7, 2026, the palazzo’s façade becomes a large-scale projection surface, with screenings running each evening from 8:30pm to 11:00pm. The result is less like an exhibition you enter and more like one the city temporarily absorbs.
That publicness feels central. In a Biennale ecosystem often shaped by invitations, previews, pavilions, and private rooms, If All Time Is Eternally Present shifts the encounter into the open air. Campo Manin becomes both square and cinema, architectural site and social space — a place where passers-by, residents, tourists, and art-world insiders can momentarily share the same image.
The partnership also connects Bottega Veneta to a specifically Venetian conversation around modernism, memory, and place. The Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation, founded in 2008, is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Italian architect, engineer, and builder, whose work sits at the intersection of structural invention and architectural imagination.
For Bottega Veneta, the collaboration continues the house’s deepening investment in art and cultural projects under Louise Trotter. But what makes this one interesting is its restraint. The brand is not placing itself at the centre of the work. Instead, it is supporting a project where fashion recedes and Venice takes over: stone, light, bodies, projection, and time folding back on itself.
In that sense, the title feels apt. If All Time Is Eternally Present suggests a city where past and present never fully separate. On the façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, contemporary moving images will meet architectural history, turning Venice into a temporary surface for memory, speculation, and nocturnal attention.
If All Time Is Eternally Present runs from May 9 to June 7, 2026 at Palazzo Nervi Scattolin, Campo Manin, Venice, with nightly projections from 8:30pm to 11:00pm.
Photos: Bottega Veneta