In Venice, a cinematic exhibition from Golden Goose blurs the line between reality and dreams

A voyage through the quaint canals of Venice, followed by a quick car journey along the city’s industrial outskirts, led guests of Golden Goose to Marghera yesterday evening (7 May 2025), the portside suburb where the Italian footwear brand was founded by Francesca Rinaldo and Alessandro Gallo in 2000.

The area is now home to a gleaming cultural space in a converted former warehouse, ‘Golden Goose Haus’. This is where our journey led us, to see ‘Altered Space’, an immersive exhibition that's part of an ongoing series of events which invite international talents to create genre-spanning installations under the ‘Haus’ name (so far, the ‘Haus’ project has coincided with the arrival of the biennale in the city, with the 2025 Architecture Biennale opening for previews today, 8 May).

Golden Goose presents ‘Altered States’ by Marco Brambilla

This year ‘Haus’ passes the baton to Italian-Canadian artist and film director Marco Brambilla – best known for his 1993 film Demolition Man and his 2023 King Size installation for the opening of the Sphere in Las Vegas – who through his unique lens converges culture, art and film with the hypnotic ‘Altered States’.

The visual installation, which was curated by Jérôme Sans, co-founder of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, took place in Golden Goose’s ‘Manovia’ which is split into different areas including an archive, a library, a ‘playground’ – which is an auditorium – and a ‘hangar’, a large exhibition area. Brambilla’s inspiration for the exhibition was drawn entirely from film imagery and sound. The show invites guests to be connected to a dream-like state with the collective subconscious, where hypnotic visuals and soundscapes are designed to guide viewers through layered realms of memory, fantasy and desire.

‘You’re meant to feel conflicting emotions,’ Brambilla tells Wallpaper*. ‘Some pieces are more inclusive and others more aggressive. It’s a show about one idea. We connect through the subconscious. Through dreams.’

Upon entrance, visitors are greeted with the first installation, titled Ovation. A large screen above an expansive water feature showcases famous characters from films spanning the 1950s to the present day, all of which played an important role in shaping Brambilla’s outlook on life and cinematography. The individual clips are processed and slowed, with the characters experiencing seemingly endless waves of human emotion in this continuous loop.

Another section, Anthology, saw Brambilla create a ‘memory timeline’, which highlights cinema across different genres and eras with photographic wallpaper. Other installations include a Celluloid Dorothy, a continuous video loop of a doe-eyed Dorothy in the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz, played by Judy Garland as she enters a dream-like state, and an immersive tunnel titled Desire, which is a hypnotic soundscape of continuous voices saying ‘I love you’.

The grand reveal, though, takes place in the hangar. Titled Heaven’s Gate, a five-minute-long series of video collages presents an auditory and visual takeover of the vast space, evoking a kaleidoscopic landscape which journeys from the birth to the death of the universe, based on Dante’s seven levels of purgatory. Accompanied with booming audio, it is hard not to physically feel the artwork as it echoes around the hangar space.

‘The new age and era which is happening right now is fantastic,’ said Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara of the ‘Haus’ projects, which give participants free creative rein. ‘It is encouraging people to become more humble and less arrogant. So many people have something to say, and nobody listens. Let’s listen. This is what we want to achieve. It gives space for people to express themselves, as culture is happening now.

‘Haus is coming from the need of people to become culture and not only to read about or buy culture,’ he continues. ‘Culture is not about artworks or history, it’s about exchanging points of view.’

Haus will be open to the public from 10-11 May 2025. Sign up for the event here.

haus.goldengoose.com