Videographic Venice: The Video Essay at the Intersection of Place and Practice

About

What does it mean to create media in a city poised at risk of vanishing? What can the video essay do to preserve, reframe, and reimagine our relationship to vulnerable spaces, ecologies, and cultural heritages? Step into Venice, one of the world’s most fragile landscapes, not as a visitor, but as a videoessayist, and learn to navigate through delicate terrains. The city itself unfolds like a living editing timeline: canals as dissolves, narrow streets as cuts, archives as layered tracks, and emergent narratives as overlays—each frame waiting to be sequenced, juxtaposed, and brought into dialogue.

This workshop explores how the video essay can be a dynamic digital intervention to suture the fragments of past and present to imagine the Venice to come. Participants will cut, layer, reframe, and (re)produce the city to create and share knowledge across disciplines. Combining critical analysis with creative practice, we will engage with Venice as both subject and medium, using videographic methods to engage intellectually and emotionally with its layered histories, cultural resonances, and fragilities. Students will examine the city’s cinematic representations, explore video essays as landscapes of intellectual, spatial, and emotional experimentation, and reflect on the interplay between cultural heritage, social dynamics, and fragile ecologies. Designed for participants from diverse fields, and building on the success of prior international videographic workshops while taking advantage of Venice’s unique artistic, historical, and spatial contexts, the workshop fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, digital literacy, and innovative modes of thinking.

Course leader

Danielle Hipkins, University of Exeter & Barbara Zecchi, University of Massachusetts

Target group

This Summer School is open to participants of all levels - from graduate students to tenured faculty - and from any academic background, as the video essay is a versatile tool that can be applied across disciplines. Participants with familiarity in Adobe Premiere Pro or other editing software may find the learning curve easier and will be given priority. While the workshop will not provide step-by-step technical training in editing, participants will be guided through the process of making their own video essays. The workshop welcomes graduate students and scholars from Film and Media Studies, Communication, Digital Humanities, Visual Arts, Literature, History, Philosophy, Ecocriticism, Spatial Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Gender Studies, and beyond. Anyone interested in engaging with audiovisual analysis and creative-critical methodologies as a mode of research, pedagogy, or artistic expression is warmly encouraged to join.

Course aim

- Critical Understanding of Videographic Criticism: Participants will gain a deep understanding of the video essay as a form of critical inquiry, learning how to analyze, produce, and evaluate video essays that engage with complex themes such as place, space, and representation;
- Practical Skills in Video Essay Production: Through hands-on exercises, participants will improve practical skills in using audiovisual techniques to create video essays;
- Interdisciplinary Application: Participants will learn to apply videographic methods across various disciplines, using the video essay to explore themes relevant to fields such as film studies, architecture, art history, cultural studies, and urban studies;
- Engagement with Venice as a Site of Inquiry: Participants will engage directly with Venice’s unique spatial and historical contexts, developing video essays that reflect on the city’s role as both a physical space and a cinematic and cultural construct;
- Collaboration and Interdisciplinary Dialogue: Through group discussions and peer feedback, participants will engage in collaborative learning, sharing insights and approaches from different disciplinary perspectives, and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue around videographic criticism.

Fee info