Guardare Venezia: la città come dispositivo visuale

This essay develops a previous paper (Parmeggiani, 2010) with the issues of Venice as a visual apparatus (Foucault, 1980), of the tourists as flâneurs (Benjamin, 1991), of their sightseeing and dynamic gazing at the urban landscape, and of their searching for the backstage (Goffman, 1959) and looking for icons to achieve cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2011). It analyzes how tourists relate to icons of a globalized visual culture where Venice has produced many other simulacra (Baudrillard, 1994), and it focuses on how social activists have tried to remediate (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) some icons of Venice to protest against the mass tourism and the loss of local identity . The identity of the city, as represented by tourist images, is the result of a long cultural process that has taken place since the Renaissance and continues to exert its effects even today. The author uses visual sociology to analyze both a corpus of mass media images (photographs on websites, postcards, brochures, stock photography) and a visual documentation of the practices of tourists visiting Venice. Following this methodology, the article describes how pictures of the city have become one of the key drivers of mass tourism there, which is considered unsustainable by a portion of the resident community. The first part of this approach (analysis of the images) concerns the urban icons, those that become standard generative models for other visual representations. Some pictures are used to describe the genesis of the icons as well as their reproduction, distribution, and remediation throughout time. The second part of the methodology (analysis with the images) concerns some documentation (photographs and videos) observing the performances of tourists in Venice. Mass tourism is described by its social practices of looking, gazing, photographing, and acquiring images. The focus is on the cycle of the production and consumption of cultural capital and icons through visual practices. The article uses a selection of photographs as an integral part of research. Photographs, postcards, and artwork that have influenced the process of creating Venetian icons help in the investigation of the tourists’ relationships with the urban space and its residents, and they also help to explain the visual identity of the Serenissima in our collective imagination.