Esto Perpetua is a group exhibition that takes a photograph of a wall in the cemetery of San Michele in the Venetian Lagoon as its conceptual starting point for a visual investigation of this emblematic city. Developed in collaboration with the Venice in Peril Fund and curated by its director, Lavinia Filippi, the exhibition frames preservation not as the maintenance of a fixed status quo but as careful negotiation between traditions and transformations.

The title draws on the Latin invocation Esto Perpetua, meaning ‘let it be perpetual’ or ‘may it last forever’, a phrase historically associated with the endurance of civic life and the idea of collective survival. In Venice, however, perpetuity has never implied immobility. The city’s longevity has always relied on adaptation and on the capacity to absorb change without compromising its identity.

Within this context, the participating artists explore Venice’s fragility and resilience through materiality, gesture and craft, as well as through collective imagination and memory. Tiina Itkonen establishes the exhibition’s conceptual and visual framework with her 2011 photograph of San Michele Island. From this image, Venice emerges as a city where endings generate continuity, a singular place shaped not only by its fragile material fabric but also by layers of memory and immaterial heritage.

Carolyn Barker-Mill engages with an archival image, a still of Donald Sutherland from the iconic film Don't Look Now, set against the atmospheric backdrop of Venice. Toby Christian wakes chalk and marble on painted board, setting residual marks that recall eroded hollows and the desiccated surfaces of the evanesced. Coco Crampton explores permanence and vulnerability through abstract yet recognisable ceramic forms that recall the elegance and stratified structures of certain Venetian architectures. Leonardo Frigo reactivates the mapping methods of the seventeenth-century Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli, treating craftsmanship as knowledge carried through gesture and as a way of thinking and storytelling. Finally, Domitilla Harding and Massimo Nordio demonstrate how traditional Murano glass techniques can remain rigorous while evolving through experimentation, embodying continuity as adaptation rather than repetition.

Together, the artists approach Venice as a site of resistance and renewal. Water, salt, time and presences continually reshape its surfaces. Stone bears the marks of erosion and pigment fades; stories turn into legends, yet the city persists through traditions, craftsmanship, collective rituals and continual adaptation. These works do not monumentalise Venice. Instead, they inhabit its instability, transforming exposure into structure and vulnerability into layered meaning.