Untitled

Detail
Overlooking the forecourt are two of three
stained glass windows fabricated in Murano
using the fifteenth-century tradition of rulli,
a laborious and masterful technique that was
used to produce the first ever glass windows.
Through the first window, which casts a pink
glow on the floor of the palazzo when the
morning sun hits it, one can see the room
that Casanova once wrote about residing in.
Further down, the turquoise and indigo
stained glass windows filter the light in space.
 These colors are introduced into the
pavilion as a reference to their symptomatic
disappearance from the rainbow flag by
which the LGBT community is commonly
represented. The pink stripe was included
in the original flag conceived by the activist
Gilbert Baker in 1978. Unexpected interest
ensued, leading to a subsequent shortage of
pink fabric in the US market. In turn, the
design was reworked (resulting in a
“commercial version”), and a year later it was
further reduced for symmetry to six colors,
where the original indigo and turquoise strips
were consequently replaced by royal blue.
This became the standard version of the flag.
 Panayiotou formally explores the colors’
complex history, in a series of glass
windows, which are adapted to available
local production possibilities. In Venice it is
imbued with the specificity of local Murano
glass production where the technique of
rulli is still in production. Pink, indigo and
turquoise re-emerge as solid colors, filtered
through the spectrum of light, re-inserting
themselves temporarily into the space of
the pavilion.