October 9, 2025 at 19:40
Palazzo Mora, Venice

Part of Time Space Existence Architecture Biennale
hosted by the European Cultural Centre in Venice, Italy

Convening Stories at the Crossroads is a projection-based public artwork that explores many intersecting histories and experiences of place, using Butler County in Southwest Ohio as its starting point, and expanding across the globe. Working in video and sound, the art of artist Diane Fellows follows a labyrinthine trail through local and personal histories. The work challenges the presumed “town/gown” separation between our institutions of higher education and the regions in which they are situated and disrupts the parochial assumptions of so-called “fly-over country.” The nineteenth-century philosopher and engineer Charles Babbage once theorized that every human utterance leaves an atomic trace on particles in the air, making our very atmosphere a vast archive of history that could be played back and analyzed. Through video and sound that spreads through public space in the night, Convening Stories attempts to simulate such an experience of atmosphere and history. 

As an iterative work, the project will now expand the global threads traced within the film more explicitly through international exhibition at the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition, held in conjunction with the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The outdoor medium of projection, with its penchant for superimposition and layering, folds the intersection of place into the fabric of the piece. Water, a motif which threads throughout the multi-channel video and sound features prominently in the Indigenous stories that bracket the narrative and serve as a formal and thematic bridge to the cityscape of Venice. Movement and dance through space, through collaboration with dancer and choreographer Ashley Goos, adds a live component to the event informed by local research and engagement.

This work was originally realized as part of the FotoFocus Biennial in October 2024, a month-long celebration of photography, film, and lens-based art held throughout the Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Dayton and Columbus, Ohio region every two years. October 2025 marks the work’s international debut as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice, Italy. This work is realized with the support of numerous collaborators, volunteers, and sources of knowledge in Butler County and beyond.

The artist, choreographer, and curator are all faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio: Diane Fellows, Professor of Architecture and Interior Design; Ashley Goos, Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre and Director of Dance; and Annie Dell’Aria, Associate Professor of Art History.

For more on artists Diane Fellows and Ashley Goos:
https://www.dianefellows.com/
https://ashleyegoos.com/