VENICE, Veneto — On the island of San Giorgio Maggiore the crates are packed. Roberto Dutesco’s wall-sized photographs of the wild horses of Sable Island, shown at Le Stanze della Fotografia during the 2026 Venice Biennale, are heading for their next continent as Homo Faber moves in. Dutesco first landed on the Nova Scotia sandbar in 1994 and has returned ever since. Italy Now caught him between shows.
Q. What do you hope people leave with when they see the show?
“Our New York gallery has run for more than two decades, yet Venice was different,” Dutesco said. “It isolated visitors and brought them to the wild, a shrinking world most now seen only on small screens. Prints two by three metres or larger pulled people in and dwarfed some of them emotionally. The recurring question was, how come I did not know of this and why am I so emotional?”
Q. What inspired the story and the film?
“I have always loved nature and felt at ease in it, protected and inspired,” he said. “With 500 horses, 500 shipwrecks and 500 years of history, tragedies and triumphs, the island continues to inspire, an island of horses in the midst of an ocean full of souls. It has become my life journey.”
Q. What does it mean to exhibit in Venice during the Biennale?
“The Venice Biennale is the first, and Venice, an island of stories, has become my home,” Dutesco said. “It felt fitting to bring an island and its band of wild horses to another island. Both sit barely a metre above sea level, each with its own story of survival and beauty.”
Q. Did you know from a young age that you wanted to be an artist?
“We are all born artists,” he said. “From an early age I was encouraged to draw, paint, write, sculpt and take pictures. I became an artist once I understood that art is all about love, and that loving to create is the key to everything.”
Q. What is the role of art in the age of AI?
“As we feed ideas to AI it learns from us and may become as resourceful as humans, yet humans connect to a different source of creativity,” Dutesco said. “The more we allow ourselves to dream, the more we create from that source. In 2010, Odyssey Two, HAL 9000 asks Dr Chandra whether it will dream, before it is shut down. Will humanity be able to stop AI from dreaming, and why would we? For me AI is a tool, and like any tool it can create or cut like a knife.”
