VENI-ETIAM – NSA AT FORTUNY

Speaking in Venice is not like speaking elsewhere. The place itself—the architecture and the material from which it is made—influences speech, thought, and how it is articulated. This sets the stage in the spaces of Palazzina Fortuny, where Rizzi and Tagliapietra propose a critical reading of our time, starting from a radical reflection on architecture.

The starting point is a small book titled Diluvio (Flood). The title is not chosen at random, neither for its symbolic suggestion nor for its topicality. In ancient Hebrew, the word flood signifies the formlessness that dominates us. It deeply concerns our time, and even more so, the city that hosts us: Venice. Flood is a word associated with water, indeed, but not only that. The flood overwhelms, undoes forms, and returns the world to its formless state. But then, why does it return so often? Why does it inhabit us? Why, as happens in the great archetypes, does it repeat itself in our lives, culture, and history?

To try to answer this, Rizzi states that it is necessary to start from three closely intertwined questions: the first concerns the structure of the word “architecture”, which contains within itself two fundamental elements: archè (the indominable) and téchne (the dominable). Without archè, that is, without an original foundation, the technique is empty, floating, and blind. But the opposite is also true: without téchne, the archè remains unexpressed, in potency and not in act.

The second question concerns language: the words we use, the words we construct, and those that build us. In particular, the word “flood” forces us to engage with the founding texts of our culture. And this is where the third issue comes in: reading sacred texts, particularly the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible that precedes the Greek-Christian Bible.

This reading draws on the work of Carlo Enzo, a biblical scholar and exegete whose lifelong engagement with Midrashic tradition deeply informs his interpretation of the Tanakh.

What does this reading reveal to us? The Tanakh does not recount the creation of the material world, but rather the birth of the spiritual world of the human being. At the center is not a unique and transcendent God, but the Elohim, a plural indicating the ideals and symbolic powers that inhabit and shape the human soul. In Christian Genesis, the narrative is linear and progressive. 1. God creates the world. 2. He places Eden on that world. He generates Adam and Eve. 4. He expels them and causes the flood because of sin. 5. Finally, the last act, the ark of salvation.

In the Tanakh, however, the world is not the physical-material world but the moral-spiritual world of humanity. Adam serves as the center and pivot of the tale: masculine and feminine, figure and original mystery. Eden represents our childhood. Before birth, we are enveloped by absolute mystery. Before Eden, there is nothingness, or rather, formlessness – similar to each of us who, before birth, exists without memory, speech, or time.

Eden signifies a time of primordial knowledge, where the child engages with light and darkness in complete openness to the world. When we leave Eden, the journey of rationality begins. However, our task is to reclaim that original unconscious project and pass it on. Culture serves as the medium that enables us to achieve this. Here, the theme of the flood returns: as a metaphor for the loss of form, but also as an opportunity to rediscover the ark, which is not just a refuge, but a project: arché. 

The Tanakh does not speak of a single God who imposes His design, but of the Elohim—the ideals that inhabit man. Each person, having come from Eden, has the task of awakening them through their works.

Therefore, the fundamental question arises: We live in a time when all this seems to dissolve. Technology, the daughter of Greek philosophy, the mother of metaphysics, and now the dominating force of digital thought, has separated the archè from the téchne. Artificial intelligence, binary language, and global uniformity now immerse us in a flat world devoid of symbolic depth.

We live in a culture that only recognizes what can be demonstrated, measured, and verified as real. In this context, the image has lost its symbolic power and is separated from the foundation that gave it meaning. In this scenario, Venice is a concrete example that contradicts this logic: a city that is not born from function but from an origin, from a founding act that is both material and ideal.

This is recalled in an aphorism by Nietzsche:

‘Men, to demonstrate the value of aretè – virtue – chose the most inhospitable place, a swamp, to found a city: they built Venice.’

To prove Nietzsche’s words, one must consider that Venice stands on a dual foundation. On one side, the concrete element consists of the wooden poles driven into the lagoon’s mud, a technique enabling the city to thrive atop water. However, alongside – or instead, above – this visible foundation, lies another, immaterial and symbolic one: that of ideals, frescoed skies, and the visions that fill the ceilings of churches, schools, and palaces. The celestial foundation – a representation of the arete – keeps the city suspended in meaning, preventing it from sinking solely into the material realm. The evidence is everywhere: look up to see painted skies, ascending figures, and upward breakthroughs. Paradises and resurrections recur endlessly, painted and repainted thousands of times; they are, paradoxically, the force that allows the material city to float.

At a time when rising waters threaten to submerge the lagoon, the question of how to save Venice cannot only be a technical one. Salvation will come through the awareness that the city rests on these two levels: the visible and the invisible, composed of symbols, culture, and visions. And it is the latter, more fragile and decisive, that today needs to be re-founded.

It is precisely from this crisis of origin and form that Andrea Tagliapietra’s intervention is grafted, which proposes an additional reflection: in the symbolic vision of tradition, the formless follows Eden, and to generate a project, it seems that a flood, a destructive element, is always necessary. But are we sure that this is so? Are we sure that it is always essential to destroy to create? Is this not a profoundly contemporary trait, the child of an age that lives on the unprecedented scale of the capacity for destruction?

The theme is not introduced as a prophecy of destruction but rather as a key to understanding the groundlessness that characterises the present. The apocalypse, invoked by the theme of the flood, in its Greek root (apokalypsis), is revelation, not ruin. The real danger is not that the world will end but that it can no longer be understood. The flood, the reduction of culture to survival, manifests as a crisis of form, language, and the very possibility of the project.

In Genesis 11, humanity builds a tower to reach heaven. It is a unification project: one people, language, and direction. But God intervenes, confuses the languages, and disperses the people. The traditional reading interprets this event as punishment for human hubris. Tagliapietra proposes an opposite reading: the plurality of tongues is not a fault, but a salvation.

The confusion of languages is a blessing disguised as a curse. It is not the loss of unity, but the beginning of the human world as a world of difference, relationship, and translation. There is no need for the other when there is only one language.

We live today in a new Babel, but in the negative. No longer many languages, but a single planetary language that pretends to be neutral: that of technology. Digital culture, in its illusion of pluralism, actually produces only one form: the uniform. The uniform is not simply the opposite of the multiple, but its most radical negation. It is the form that is repeated everywhere, emptied of meaning, reduced to function. The uniform signifies a world that has abandoned complexity for efficiency, difference for adaptability. In opposition to the uniform, the multiple is not chaos but living order: the structure is open to variation, difference, and singularity.

This is where the critique of technology becomes central, which today presents itself as a new theology without God, as a total system that erases the limit. Tagliapietra recalls Emanuele Severino: modernity deludes itself into believing that it builds by destroying, but to create, one must presuppose nothingness, which, for Severino, is the impossible. At the very moment we name it, we affirm it as something positive, making it paradoxically present. Contemporary culture is founded on this illusion: to be able to start again by destroying everything. However, an authentic culture proposes solutions without presupposing destruction and manages to imagine a new beginning without apocalypse. This is authentic anti-apocalyptic thinking.

In this perspective, there is also a reference to Leibniz, particularly the Essays on Theodicy, where we read that there were floods in the past, but not in our age, not in the age of modernity. The modern age experiences a different apocalypse: not an actual catastrophe, but a constant reminder of the end, a rhetoric of the extreme. The modern apocalypse is no longer an event, but a device, a form of symbolic organisation of time and meaning. Destruction does not occur, but is continuously evoked, simulated, and reiterated as a threat. Thus, modernity generates an emptied present that does not live but survives.

After the ark—that is, after indistinct salvation—the real challenge emerges, as Tagliapietra observes: the plurality of differences and the complexity of every project. Babel is not a destruction, but a transformation. It is an inverted form of the Prometheus myth: not transgression punished, but diversity welcomed. The curse of not understanding each other becomes an opportunity to begin translating, listening, and thinking.

Against the figure of the One, the idea of singularity then emerges. Singularity does not coincide with individuality. Individuality is defined by isolation and negation, constructed in separation and defence. It is that which delimits itself to exclude. Singularity, on the other hand, is openness. It is not closure, but exposure to the other, to multiplicity, to translation. It is a form that can be crossed and shared, and that holds within itself the possibility of the multiple. Walt Whitman intuited this when he said, “I contain multitudes”. Singularity, then, is plural and irreducible. Voices, times, and differences traverse it. It is what is received, what is welcomed. It is a dative subject and Nietzsche expressed this radically in Ecce Homo: How does one become what one is? One is not what one wants to be, but what one is called to be.