Tatiana Trouvé has covered part of the ornate marble floor of Palazzo Grassi with a new sculpture which combines elements commonly found on the roads of modern cities in an asphalt ground, to create a kind of cosmological chart.

The black asphalt is embedded with casts in different metals of manhole covers and metal plates for utilities found by Trouvé in cities around the world including Paris, London, Rome, Venice, and New York. They suggest an imaginary map of an underground network through which water and power flows. Like these other cities, Venice was once at the heart of a powerful empire, based on control of the Mediterranean Sea, and in Trouvé’s sculpture, it is as if the waters of the world are converging here in Venice, beneath our feet.

If the drain covers are like portals to other realities, aquatic and psychic, the asphalt ground, when viewed from the floors above, becomes a chart of the night sky, of a kind used by humans as a guide for their travels on land and sea over millennia.

The constellation suggests that a range of different coordinates will be helpful for the visitor navigating their way through the spatial and temporal worlds created by Trouvé in the exhibition.

Watch the installation of the work Hors-sol in one minute