Perle di Luce

Perle di Luce is a photographic and research project started in 2018 between Venice and Murano. It tells the art of Venetian glass beads, the people who safeguard its knowledge and the places where this tradition lives on. In 2020 the art of glass beads was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Photographs, testimonies, archives and production sites form a single visual story: the artisans’ contemporary gestures alongside the traces of a production that for centuries connected Venice to distant lands, from Africa to Asia and the Americas.

Knowledge in the hands

Beadmaking is learned by doing: watching, repeating, correcting, developing a feel for glass and fire. The project follows artisans in their workshops, attentive to the technique and to the relationship built over time with tools, materials and gestures. In collaboration with the CPVV Committee for the Safeguarding of the Art of Venetian Glass Beads.

An industrial memory

Beside the active workshops, Perle di Luce explores disused factories, warehouses and sample archives: thousands of traces of colours, shapes and tools that tell the economic and social side of this production. In collaboration with Costantini Glassbeads Murano.

Passing on knowledge

Intangible heritage only exists if it is practised and handed down. Today the research follows the bond between masters and new generations, such as the young artisans trained by master beadmaker Alessia Fuga through scholarships from Fondazione The Place of Wonders.

The project has been shown at the Venice Glass Week and Homo Faber, received a special mention at the Premio Fondazione di Venezia and has grown into an editorial layout, the video art short film Perle di Mare, premiered at the Glocal Film Festival 2023, and an immersive installation at Bottega Cini.