Space-Time Warp: Going from Japan to Italy to Planet Kaitain. A Dune of a Journey.
How the Italian fascination with Japan gets its due in Dune Part 2.
I can get carried away when I see an exhibition that really pleases me. Rome might not be the best place to experience art, other cities do it better, like Milan chock full of amazing art foundations or Naples where most big time artists want to show their work. Rome lacks the big and flexible exhibition spaces that are ideal for contemporary shows or perceptive curatorial projects. Yet the 18th century Palazzo Braschi, sitting right at the bottom of Piazza Navona, while not my ideal venue— its rooms are claustrophobic, and the circulation labyrinthine— can, from time to time, put up an unusually good show. And of course, having recently seen Dune Part 2, directed by Denis Villeneuve, the tragic dynastic saga that features a few short glimpses of Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Tomb in San Vito d’Altivole, in Veneto, I was surprised that the Italian fascination with Japan goes a long way back. Wait, you could rightly be asking, how can anyone connect Italy with Japan and Dune in the same sentence?
Ukiyoe. The Floating World, Visions from Japan, which runs until the June 23, doesn’t break much new ground: the show is based on a collection of about 150 works assembled mainly by the Italian engraver and sculptor, Edoardo Chiossone, who lived in Japan at the end of the 19th century. His collection, permanently housed at the Oriental Art Museum E. Chiossone in Genoa, is the main source for this exhibition in Rome. Most of the wood-cuts and silk prints featured here are from the Seventeenth century Edo, today’s Tokyo.
As I have no special expertise in Japanese art so I can’t really get into the detailed history of these magnificent images of daily life in Edo, designed to be appreciated by a growing mass audience. On the other hand, these kinds of shows help to explain the origins of what has become in recent times an increasingly global Anime phenomenon. For me, recognizing in these 17th and 18th century artworks the fantastical anthropomorphic creatures that are floating across the films of Hayao Miyazaki is a big discovery in and of itself.
The origins of this extraordinary collection, assembled following Edoardo Chiossone’s extended residency in Japan in the late 1800s, is something I would like to know more about, and was sorrowfully under-explored in this exhibition Ukiyoe. These days, a collection’s backstory is as interesting as the upfront texts pasted to the gallery walls. While many foreign art compilations have questionable origins, frequently the consequence of colonial conquest, theft, cultural appropriation or historical impropriety, this exhibition seems to be drawn from an Italian artist whose work experience with the Japanese arts and crafts industry was by official request from the Japanese state.
There is this fascination with Japan especially among Italian artists and architects that clearly intrigues me. So back to my original statement, about this connection between Japan and Italy that you can fast-forward to the present, when an incredibly beautiful architectural masterpiece, the Brion Tomb located in a peripheral area of Veneto becomes a set piece for one of the key scenes in the film Dune Part 2.
Like Edoardo Chiossone before him, Carlo Scarpa, the architect responsible for designing the cited masterpiece in Veneto, was also fixated with Japan, to the extent that he met his untimely death there in 1978, at the age of 72, from a concussion suffered in a fall while visiting the city of Sendai. On his first visit to Japan in 1969, at the behest of the Cassina manufacturer, for the exhibition Furniture Design Italiano, he immersed himself in all things Japanese: he sketched and photographed the buildings and landscapes, noting architectural details, joineries, and the way Japanese gardens followed the flows of nature. He would become increasingly interested in Japanese poetry and philosophy, and befriended several leading Japanese architects, like Kenzo Tange, Tadao Ando and Fumihiko Maki. The most Japanese influenced work of Carlo Scarpa is unquestionably the Brion Tomb, in San Vito d’Altivole in the province of Treviso.
Scarpa was commissioned by the Brion family when the founder of Brionvega, the famed design based electronics manufacturer died unexpectedly. A large L shaped plot of land circumscribes the town’s historic cemetery, and includes a number of tomb structures, chapels, water ponds, time elements, and lots of landscaped nature. Scarpa was famously obsessive about the detailing, and as I heard from the ground’s custodian, the architect would reputedly go over and over the architectural designs, forcing workers on more than one occasion to redo from scratch a particular architectural feature.
I had the luck to record a video, during one trip to the Brion Tomb with students. The stories recount the times when Scarpa was around, as told by the custodian, Giuseppe Marcolin, and the owner of the nearby cafè, Vilma, where Scarpa regularly had lunch. Both had fond memories of the architect as he followed the construction on the building site. Luckily I found the video, made from a “flip” camera in 2004. You can view it from this link.
In the Fall of 2016 the MAXXI museum in Rome dedicated a complete exhibition to Carlo Scarpa’s relationship to Japanese culture, “Carlo Scarpa and Japan. The highlight of the exhibit remains of course the Brion Tomb, really the quintessential Scarpa project that demonstrates his profound understanding of Japanese design philosophy. As for Dune Part 2: according to Phil de Semlyen writing in the magazine TimeOut, the scenes for Kaitain featuring Princess Irulan —Florence Pugh, and the Reverend Mother Mohiam —Charlotte Rampling, were shot at the Brion Tomb. Semlyen notes : “It’s the first time a film has been allowed to shoot there, explains producer Tanya Lapointe. ‘[We] reached out to the Brion family and asked, ‘Would it be possible to film on location?’ They had always said no, but the Brion family happened to have read “Dune” by Frank Herbert, and had loved the film directed by Denis Villeneuve, and they allowed us to film within this location.’” What we see in Dune, at least in those short scenes filmed in San Vito d’ Altivole for Part 2, is an incredible space-time warp, from Japan via Italy, to the stars.