Our Participation In The Venice Glass Week

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Again, this year Venice will celebrate for a week one of her most valuable resources: glass.
Master glassmakers, collectors, artists, gallery owners or just plain enthusiasts, everyone is invited to praise the centuries’ old design and techniques of the Serenissima. 
And what best occasion to admire the unprecedented styles and lines of the new glass virtuosos?
Old and new, water and sand, glass and reflections… welcome to The Venice Glass Week!
The festival will take place from September 7th to 15th and will host a large number of exhibitions, workshops, conferences and other engaging events among Venice, Murano and Mestre. 
We of Antichità al Ghetto will be part of it for the third time in a row, setting up an exhibition in our showroom in the Venice Jewish Quarter. 
There are still a few months left, nevertheless we are already rolling up our sleeves, there is so much to do!

We will soon talk about our exhibition (please check our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages for follow-ups). Today we would like to answer to all those who have been asking us what it takes to participate to The Venice Glass Week.

The first fundamental requirement is to passionately love Murano glass, in all its various forms and expressions. 
To love this lively and living matter, that witnessed the passing of centuries and that is almost flowing in Venetians’ veins. 
Murano glass breaths, transforms itself, reflects our life and emphasizes its fragility.
How not to fall in love with it?

The second requirement is way more pragmatic: candidates are asked to develop a project on Murano glass, a project suitable for public use and enjoyment. 
The Organizing and Promoting Committee, which task is to select the events according to their eligibility, offers much room for individual creativity, favoring solid and original contents. 
Each application must be submitted to the Committee attention within fixed deadlines (normally by the first four months of the year): to apply, you only need to fill in a form and attach some nice pictures. 
Anyone is welcome to participate, from the single citizen to the famous art gallery as long as the project and the space where it will take place are well defined. 
After that, you must wait. You must wait for the jury, composed by Venetian and non-Venetian experts on glass, to examine each application and give its approval. 

Once your project gets confirmed, you must simply step up and get it done.
The participation to The Venice Glass Week is completely – and in our opinion, amazingly – free.
Nevertheless, feel free to devote as much time, energies – and, why not, investments – as you like. The Committee does not impose any requirement. It goes without saying that the more you devote yourself, the more exposure and satisfaction you will get. 
At least, that has been very true for us. 

Taking part at The Venice Glass Week is always stimulating, starting with the drawing up of the application.
As for us, creating and developing every year an exhibition theme is a wonderful challenge: first of all, we need to find an original and consistent leitmotif. At the same time, it is important to find a subject that reflects our individual taste, our shop style, a subject that is interesting enough to capture the curiosity of old and new visitors.  

We have been organizing thematic exhibition in our showroom since the very first edition of the Festival. You may think that most of our work gets fully done only on the few days preceding The Venice Glass Week. 
Well, it’s not quite that.  
In order to allow our visitors to best enjoy our displayed items, each of our exhibitions is accompanied by a catalogue with pictures and photo enlargements, written in six languages (oh yes, we like to make our life difficult!).
The selection of the objects to display, their cataloguing, description and further translation starts months before. 

Marketing is equally fundamental. 
The Venice Glass Week is deeply committed to the promotion of all events through its own channels. You must consider, though, that the number of participants is about 150 – 200; marketing operators have no choice but to give a reasonably limited space to each participant. 
That is exactly why it is very important to independently advertise your own event. We guarantee that all efforts get paid off in the end and everybody involved in the Festival can benefit from it. 

We have been focusing our promotion almost exclusively on Social Networks while our followers and visitors’ enthusiasm did the rest. 
So many have been taking pictures of our exhibitions, sharing them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. We got surprised by the word-of-mouth that anticipated each exhibition opening and were so happy to reach not only glass enthusiasts, but also experts and collectors from Venice and from all over Italy. 

Despite our commitment, we manage to visit some other exhibitions organized during The Venice Glass Week discovering new realities and meeting other Murano glass lovers.
Being part, though for only a week, of a community sharing the wonderful aim of promoting Venice glass and its history, make us very proud.
That is the reason why we hope that The Venice Glass Week may soon become a world-famous annual appointment just like the Biennale and Venice Film Festival.

What else to add?
Don’t miss next Festival application terms! You could be one of the participants!
For further information please consult the official website of The Venice Glass Week.

Moreover, we would like to take this occasion to thank Camilla Purdon, the extraordinary Festival Coordinator, whose amazing work made everything you saw and will see possible!
A special thank also goes to Monica Cesarato and Carla Maria Francesca Bosco for allowing us to share their beautiful pictures!

We look forward to seeing in you at our exhibition “Zogie in micromosaico” (translated: Jewels in Micromosaic)!
In the meantime please have a look at our previous Festival events:
– Venice: Harmonies of Glass and Fabrics;
– Audacious Fantasies in Micromosaic.

Now we must go back to cataloguing and translating, The Venice Glass Week 3rd Edition is just around the corner… until next time! 😉