From its historic heritage to contemporary research, the new director Cristiana Collu shares her vision of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia as an open, layered space that resists any single definition. A place where different times, languages and sensibilities can coexist, generating new relationships and unexpected ways of seeing.
Upon her arrival, Cristiana Collu brought transformative energy to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. A “sentimental revolution” is underway, one that excavates historical roots while opening new perspectives, revealing profound respect and love for a heritage encompassing not merely artworks and objects, but people, ideas, thoughts, and actions. This revaluation redefines exhibition practices, cultural creation, and artistic engagement. Without fanfare, the art historian, curator, manager, and university professor has been methodically constructing a new institutional identity while offering the public multiple visions of the contemporary through four distinct exhibitions.
On institutional identity
Every definition delimits and excludes; the Querini resists this logic. By nature, it is irreducible to a single category – more than a museum, library, house, or cultural centre. It is a complex form of cohabitation. Life always exceeds the categories we invent to describe it. Rather than seeking taxonomic definition, I would draw from set theory, the notion of device, or relational poetics: a space where differences, temporalities, and languages don’t exclude each other but coexist and generate unexpected combinations. Not a binary system, but a constellation of relations. If forced to choose one word: “untaggable”. The most interesting things rarely reduce to hashtags. The Querini belongs to that rare category of inexhaustible places that continuously produce meaning precisely because they never fully coincide with any definition. This open, elusive, transgenerational nature renders it genuinely contemporary.
Role in the artistic landscape
Rather than “role,” I would speak of posture, perspective, attitude. The Querini brings a plurality of viewpoints to Venetian and international cultural discourse. It doesn’t assert a univocal vision but creates possibilities for unexpected encounters, crossings, and readings. Its uniqueness establishes it as a site where different disciplines, temporalities, and sensibilities coexist within a cultural mosaic built through accretion over time around a pre-existing structure capable of welcoming successive stratifications. Here, the past functions not as inert history but as an active reserve continuously generating new configurations and interrogating the present, weaving dense networks of relations across diverse communities of reference.
Strategic direction and methodology
From the beginning, the objective has been recovering the Foundation’s roots and identity while transporting it into the future. I work through improvisation and approximation: grasping one’s own moment, which always surprises us, and approaching objectives without ever saturating them. My orientation emerges from genealogy by examining the relationship between roots and futurity as an activation process where memory and promise prove inseparable. Composing this trajectory means adopting complexity as method. Here, the criterion is not order but the capacity to hold diverse temporalities together without reducing them to synthesis, maintaining instead their transformative tension.
The Dreamer exhibition
This approach characterizes much of my work. Reconceiving the Querini collection as if it were a temporary exhibition, or better, as a film set or theatrical stage – questions how images inhabit time. Rather than dialogue between ancient and contemporary, The Dreamer posits that artworks never belong to a single temporal moment but contain stratifications continuously reactivated by present viewing. The space becomes a montage apparatus, a time machine following relational logic rather than chronology. Each room functions as an autonomous sequence while participating in a broader system where works reciprocally rewrite themselves. This is not singular narrative but critical juxtaposition of fragments producing meaning in the intervals between things. Here, the visitor is never merely spectator but active participant in perceptual construction. The interweaving of historical works and contemporary interventions reveals that images remain dynamic, continuously generating experiential forms.
Concurrent exhibitions for the 2026 Biennale
The Querini functions as a multiplex of visions: not a single path but multiple environments where different languages coexist and mutually activate. Cosmotechnics: Ding Yi as a Planetary Code opens reflection on sign architecture and systems organizing the visible, where texture and pattern become thought forms and world-construction codes. Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits shifts focus to painting as sedimentation and reinvention – between gesture, memory, and image instability. The Invisible Chord: Hans Hartung and Music introduces subtraction and vibration, indirectly dialoguing with John Baldessari’s research, where images construct themselves through montage, cutting, and interval, transforming vision into analytical, discontinuous process. Together, these three exhibitions compose a relational field between different visual practices, interrogating from diverse perspectives the very construction of image experience.
Transformation through place
Working at and for the Querini has fundamentally transformed my curatorial vision. The Venice + Querini combination – an addition complex as mathematical function – directly interrogates my ways of looking, reading, translating, and transmitting. Both are simultaneously dense and fluid, impossible to resist. One must become osmotic, allowing oneself to be traversed by the psychic and cosmic rhythm of a water city that perpetually enchants, fascinates, and surprises while guarding its mystery.