The Venereal City by Will Aitken

Will Aitken is a Montreal artist and writer who works in collage using Japanese chiyogami decorative paper, laser-printed images and text. He is new to the medium and to art-making in general, having picked up his scissors in 2020. As a writer he has published four novels - The Swells, Realia, A Visit Home and Terre Haute - and two non-fiction works - Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of Resistance and Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic.

View PIVOT, a video collage created by Will Aitken describing his art practice.

"The Venereal City"

In spring 2025 I came across a photo of Venice, apparently taken underwater, so the pilings that keep the city afloat are its main focus, along with Venice herself rising above them. I was so taken with this image I set out to build a collage from it.

The title I chose arises from the word venereal’s etymology: in Middle English, of or relating to sexual intercourse; in Latin, venerius, of or relating to sex; and from Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

In Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd comments, In poetry, and drama, Venice was often portrayed as the beloved woman. It has been celebrated for its power to seduce the visitor, to lure him or her into its uterine embrace … The city was invariably represented as a female symbol, whether as the Virgin in majesty or as Venus rising from the sea … legend says Venice was founded on 25 March 421, the feast of the Annunciation, and on that same day Venus was in the ascendant.

It turns out I was seduced by an image of Venice, excited by its subterranean mysteries, its terranean beauty and particularly intrigued by the dark romance of the sunken gondola. I’ve learned more recently the photo is a fake, some say concocted with Photoshop, others by AI. It should have occurred to me that the water in the city’s canals is never that limpid, and its pilings are more usually encased in brick.

In bending this fictive image to my use, I decided to replace the Virgin Mary with a pagan figure more in keeping with the Venus myth. The looming presence in the upper left-hand corner is a votive female figurine carved in alabaster from the Temple of Inanna in Nippur, an ancient Sumerian city. It dates to approximately 2700 BCE and stands ten inches tall.