Done.Book: Picturing the City of Society:An Inquiry into the Depth of Visual Archives. (The Venetian Notebooks of John Ruskin versus the Picture Library of Alvio Gavagnin.) - Hardcover

In his project Migropolis, Wolfgang Scheppe dealt with Venice as a prototype for the escalation of the globalized city. Now, in this visual study, the German philosopher, who lives and teaches in Venice, has turned to this city yet again for an investigation into the means and scale of representation for the purpose of discovering how its image archives can enable understanding its social character. In this conceptual work, entitled Done.Book, he relates two obsessive attempts at archiving Venice: John Ruskin’s notebooks and the never-before-seen collection of photographs taken by a resident of the city’s working-class district adjacent to the Biennale’s Giardini. Both evince the conviction that the cognitive quality of the image is a means of acquiring insight, and both also stem from a self-imposed ethical commitment to provide a comprehensive representation of the details of an urban network whose truth can be glimpsed in the minutiae, the hidden details.