30 years, as a chronicler of art (and of feelings), because from there one has the sensation of embracing the whole city, including its waters, which instead is a more difficult operation compared to other places at sea level. From the altanelle or from the bell towers it is easier, of course, but Venice is its incurable foundations, it is the perspective of those who walk and look at the Canal from zero point (as happens in some Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino). The seaweed that moves, reddish, like the hair of an enormous woman who mysteriously lives under the city, and perhaps holds it up. It is possible that it’s her fury unleashing those stormy moments, favoring the idea of disappearance. Death by water, as T.S. Eliot told in The Waste Land. The Phlebas of the poem was a Phoenician – a pioneer civilization, together with the Roman one, in the matter of large-scale hydraulic engineering works – but he could have easily been Venetian. And Westerman probably would have gone looking for him underwater not so much to have evidence that the character really existed, but rather that we all are, or have been, really alive, at least for some moment, outside of literature. Alive in Venice, this impossible city that we never wanted (or we have never been able, who knows) to understand. Westerman writes, reworks and moves within the fluid element with the permeability of his prose and his stories. That of November 4, 1966, when the hydrograph marked the record measurement of 194 centimeters above the zero point. Almost two meters more: a climate apocalypse movie-like scenario, more or less. «A strong sirocco wind, in cahoots with manifold celestial bodies, raised the Adriatic sea up to the Campanile lift. Suddenly, with the Campanile ankle-deep in water, all splendour seemed ephemeral. On the flooded docks, the buildings seemed about to be washed away like cardboard boxes. The survival of Venice and its load of traditions once again seemed only a matter of time. The quays were littered with gutted gondolas, bare shores, like beached carcasses of sea creatures». Entr’acte #02: spring 2017, Palazzo Grassi. From the large windows on the second floor, all the wonderment proper to the Venetian light enters on a clear day. The blue sculpture by Damien Hirst occupies the whole room: it’s Andromeda and the sea monsters. A shark and a giant water snake with gaping jaws are about to pounce on the young woman chained to the rocks. She turns her head and screams, very loud, forever. A moment before the tragedy is about to take place, that famous moment of silence (it's still just a sculpture) before the crash. Andromeda carries the features of Tilda Swinton. It seems to me the perfect image to give a concrete dimension to Westerman's words. Sea creatures that besiege and are about to tear apart the city impossible to exist. And perhaps, forever we will stand on the threshold of an announced, set, perhaps never consumed tragedy. (One evening, in 2022, while I was wandering around San Marco, lost in the preview days of the Art Biennale, Tilda Swinton actually came out of a door, in front of me. For a moment we met our gazes, then we went in different directions). Marinetti proclaiming his hatred for Venice as a decadent brothel city, St. Mark’s Campanile suddenly collapsed in 1902, the Liberty Bridge as Mussolini’s middle finger. It all happens in a few pages that always seem about to be overwhelmed by the tide, or by the Vajont mass of water. But, for this time, I want to leave the clearest silhouette in this story to be that of Venice, less tragic, more elusive. «We have to live with traumatic events like a hecatomb in a remote valley – Westerman also told me – and so we create stories». Stories defeating death. Stories possessing the tenacity of the undertow or of Lido’s wooden huts, so provisional as to seem inevitably destined to eternity. A bit like the scream of Andromeda-Tilda in that exhibition of the former angry boy of British contemporary art, so absurd and wonderful and bombastic and grotesque. Pay attention, the four adjectives are also very good to describe another thing: life. Postscript: a lake in Africa, after the flood. There are other waters in Frank Westerman's bibliography, not only the Venetian one, greenish and so loaded with Thomas Mann. There is also Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, around which in 1986, on the night between the 21st to the 22nd of August, suddenly and without any sign of destruction over two thousand people and many animals died. The survivors had pustules and suffered from asphyxiation. Witnesses spoke of an explosion and of the lake water which, from crystal-clear, had suddenly turned red. Westerman went there too, around those science fiction waters, to tell something impossible in first person. The lake of non-knowledge, in a sense; a place where, in order to seek the possibility of a truth, it was necessary to swim towards the increasingly dark bottom, while in the opposite direction religious, scientific, anthropological narratives emerged, each in its own way simplifying, each in its own way as true as false. Goffredo Fofi defined that book – L’enigma del lago rosso (transl. The enigma of the red lake, 2015) – «a journey into the confusion of the world and into the babel of the many answers sought and given». All overwhelmed, in the end, by the waters of the Nyos, which kept its secret hidden within it, as sung in Turandot. Ahab sank with Moby Dick, many other human
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