Dreams in Transit (Venezia, Sept 3–7, 2025)

From September 3 to 7, 2025, the façade of the Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco becomes a stage of silent testimony. Dreams in Transit, conceived by the Fondazione Art for Action with the support of The Human Safety Net, overlays the Renaissance arcades with a sequence of one hundred monumental portraits of migrants, all depicted from behind. This reversal, at once disarming and radical, is inspired by JR’s Inside Out project yet subverts its language of direct confrontation: here, absence becomes presence, the unseen becomes palpable, and the distance between departure and arrival is condensed into a single frame. Each figure turns its back to the city, embodying the moment of leaving, yet facing the invisible horizon of a possible future.

The installation unfolds as a living palimpsest where the grandeur of Venetian history collides with the fragile realities of displacement. The photographs, arranged in two continuous rows, graft contemporary narratives of migration onto the centuries-old stone, making Piazza San Marco a canvas of collective memory. As Amandine Lepoutre notes, “When you look at them from the back, you feel their sadness, the weight on their shoulders.” This act of turning away is also an invitation to the viewer: not to gaze upon the individual, but to walk with them, to share a fragment of their trajectory.

Inside the Casa di The Human Safety Net, the project expands into a multi-sensory exhibition, open until March 15, 2026, where Dreams in Transit deepens into a layered polyphony of voices, images, and temporalities. Sarah Makharine’s Echoes of Dreams translates fragments of personal aspirations into an auditory landscape, making migration not only visible but resonant. The late Leila Alaoui’s intimate portraits of Lebanese refugees restore dignity and presence to those at risk of vanishing from public consciousness, her work itself marked by the poignancy of her premature passing. Lorraine de Sagazan and Anouk Maugein construct a fragile Babel Tower out of hotel bedsheets, evoking the precariousness of exile, while Ange Leccia floods the space with a glowing sea of inflatable globes, an allegory of interconnected homelands adrift on unstable waters. Together, these works form a constellation of narratives, bridging documentary urgency with poetic abstraction.

The project is not isolated but embedded within a larger initiative, After Migration, launched by Art for Action during the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. It extends beyond art into civic engagement. On September 4, during the Venice Film Festival, The Human Safety Net hosted a public conference with the International Panel on Social Progress, bringing together associations, scholars, and cultural practitioners to debate the long-term implications of migration. The event culminated with the premiere of Sweet Refuge, a short film by Maryam Mir, followed by a dialogue with producer Anadil Hossain, highlighting cinema’s role in shaping narratives of inclusion and empathy.

What makes Dreams in Transit singular is its ability to transform the act of representation into a civic gesture. By showing migrants from behind, it denies the viewer the ease of voyeurism and compels a different form of proximity: to stand not before them, but beside them. It is both monumental and ephemeral—installed for only five days, yet seared into Venice’s symbolic heart. It reminds us that migration is both an enduring human condition and a fleeting, fragile experience lived in the in-betweens.

Ultimately, the installation does more than occupy space; it redefines it. Piazza San Marco, historically the stage of empire, commerce, and spectacle, becomes a civic square of empathy and confrontation. Dreams in Transit insists that visibility is not enough; what matters is the act of listening, of sharing, of reimagining belonging. In this suspended moment, the migrants’ unseen gazes turn Venice into a mirror, asking not what they leave behind, but what we are willing to see ahead.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved