Art students of all stripes are hard at work in the studios of the Şahenk Center as the Fall semester winds down. Usually, this would mean that some students were completing artworks begun during the trip to Venice, Italy for our October Academic Travel encounter with the Serenissima. Instead, this year, the week-long travel was canceled for the reason that travel to most of our usual destinations is not allowed or would require self-quarantine on arrival and on return to campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an alternative, Ms. Natalie Philpot and the Academic Travel team collaborated with the Visual Arts department to offer modified weekend journeys to cities in Switzerland where travel is permitted and where there are world-class museums to visit, as well as modern architecture and European culture to soak up. One group was able to travel to Basel in October, but proposed trips to Bern and Lausanne were also canceled due to concerns over health and safety as numbers of cases rose across Switzerland and Europe.
Students and faculty alike lament the interruption to the historic and annual sojourns to Venice. The same can be said for many of the traditional trips to destinations like Rome, Florence, and the Alps. 2020 will go down in TASIS history as the first year for many decades where students did not have the opportunity in the Fall semester to take their education out of the classroom and into the streets and villages to discover the history, science, the natural world, and art from their studies.
The Venice Art and Photography trips were developed by the long-time Art department chair and founder of TASIS Photography, Horst Dürrschimdt, and refined over time by art and photography groups. In recent years the IB Visual Arts classes have benefitted from visiting the Venice Biennale of Art and taking in the many and varied ideas in contemporary artworks and curation.
Through the summer and autumn of 2020 students and teachers have seen images and video clips of an empty Venice, void of the throngs of tourists that flock to the city, arriving in the large cruise ships that usually dock in the lagoon. The lack of tourist presence has been disastrous for the local economy, but the water of the canals has cleared and the tourists have been replaced by birds and other wildlife.
There is no guarantee that art students will have the luxury of a week-long visit to Venice in 2021, even if travel restrictions are lifted and the danger to health from the pandemic is abated. TASIS Headmaster Christopher Nikoloff has announced that Academic Travel as traditionally offered at the school is suspended and that organized student travel will happen on weekends and long weekends throughout the year.
For now, students in the classes of 2021 and 2022 are the last from TASIS to have had a week in Venice concentrated on sketching, painting, and photography. As the autumn turns to winter, one must hope that the future will find new students from TASIS roaming the walk streets and riding the Vaporetto in the discovery of Venice, Italy.
