TRASVASO is a breathless passage through an unrecognizable Venice, seen by an unknown traveler whose perception of the world is not quite like ours. Under this unsteady gaze, the city reconfigures itself. Domes, palazzi, arcades, marble facades slide, pivot, open, slip and recombine. Venice becomes raw material for composing another Venice. Skimming the canals, the reflections tremble, the water swells and overturns, the underside becomes the surface, poured from one vessel into another, trasvaso. Is it the passage of this invisible traveler that unsettles the city and makes it ripple with the rush of his flight, or is it the city, already deep in its own metamorphosis, that jolts him and urges him to quicken his crossing? Here, cause and effect flip a coin. The soundtrack carries that uncertainty with a voice that climbs steadily into the high register and blasts the city’s structure into mirror shards. Do the music and the voice follow and accompany these transformations, or is it the other way round, successive moults triggered by the voice’s variations? The viewer is constantly invited to question this back and forth between command and consequence, which stands in for narration. In sixty seconds, TRASVASO shows another facet of a mechanism ARLO has set in motion in the exhibition DISTORTION(S), in collaboration with TEGMO, Venice as instrument, breath, matter, mirror. We travel with a spirit, a soul, an unknown wanderer mid-metamorphosis. Recognizable, lost, then reassembled, the city keeps passing from one container to the next. If we ask what is being decanted into what, the answer remains afloat, we are in Venice after all.

Inspiration

Venice’s material grammar, tesserae, polished stone, canal reflections, and the idea that a city can be “played” like an instrument. I’m also extending research from DISTORTION(S), our exhibition in Paris (ARTIFEX LAB) with mirror artist TEGMO, exploring how images behave on reflective matter and in public space.

What it does

TRASVASO stages a breathless passage through a reconfiguring Venice. Under an unstable gaze, domes, palazzi, and arcades slide, rotate, and re-slot like a marble-and-water Rubik’s Cube, like a wandering soul. Reflections flip below/above as if liquid were poured from one vessel into another, trasvaso.

How we built it

Image generation: ComfyUI with FLUX-dev, using a custom workflow that combines 3D

Animation: WAN 2.2 keyframes to drive the city’s reconfiguration and timing, plus Kling ai keyframes

Editing & compositing: After Effects

Sound design: SFX generated with mmAudio (ComfyUI) and layered textures from ElevenLabs; original score composed in Suno from edited stems. The soundtrack is intentionally ambiguous, at times the music seems to drive the image, at others the image bends the music.