One artwork that really struck me on our trip was a piece called StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream, which was a part of the Ukrainian exhibition featured in the Biennale. We stumbled upon this site on our last day in Venice and took some time to explore it. The collection as a whole, called Dare to Dream, inhabited an old house along the canal. It was full of very nostalgic, bittersweet works addressing things such as war, loss, and the idea of human connection. I spent the time we were here alone, and there weren't many other visitors, either. It almost felt as if we had the place to ourselves. As I wandered through, I was expecting many of the pieces to be heavily related to the recent wars, which I know little about. However, the more I saw, the more I was able to connect to the works and see other themes in them, as well. The collection filled all three stories of the house, some placed in the central gathering spaces, and some tucked away in a smaller room in the corner. What really stuck with me, though, began as I made my way to the third story of the house. The first thing I noticed was a faint ticking noise, that every so often would speed up, slow down, stop, and then repeat. This noise echoed through the third floor as I traveled from piece to piece, creating a slightly eerie, but curious feeling. In the last room, off to the side, I finally discovered where this noise was coming from. The artwork called StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream consisted of two hanging tickboards which worked together to display phrases. These boards were reminiscent of the type of thing you would see at an old-school airport or train station, displaying arrival and departure information. As I watched them shuffle between letters and numbers, reading off the phrases they eventually landed on, I started to notice that all of it ran together, like a poem, in a way. Even further, the two boards seemed to communicate with one another, like two people talking. What I could eventually gather, after watching for a while and reading the information provided about the piece, was that it was meant to speak to the intricacy and depth of human connections, which one can often notice at points of transit; where people are saying goodbye, meeting for the first time, and everything in between. Additionally, viewers are kept intrigued by messages that disappear before they are ever fully displayed. It felt very intentional to me that this piece was featured as the last you interact with before leaving. As some pieces dialed from a more specific topic or were more unique to Ukraine, this one seemed to be a unity piece that any person could connect to in some way. After all, everyone has had to say their fair share of hello’s and goodbye’s. This piece had a way of being romantic, sad, hopeful, and elusive all at the same time, and in a way, tied together and reminded me of all of the other individual pieces in the exhibit. I think this piece struck me so much, one because of its concept, which I thought was particularly beautiful, but second, because it displayed a very simple idea in a very complex way, which ignited many of the senses. One experience I had throughout this trip was confusion over whether or not something really counted as art. Particularly, when we would come across videos displayed as an artwork. I think this piece in the Ukraine exhibition did all the things that the other “art videos” wanted to. The sound you could hear before seeing the piece created curiosity, it was visually more complex and interesting than a video, and watching it, I was able to connect to it personally and imagine my own narrative, which I would imagine each viewer had a different experience with. The experience I had interacting with this artwork has been insightful for me in my overall reflections on our time in Italy. So much of what we saw, especially projects by Scarpa, were deeply focused on the intersection of old and new, or the idea of timelessness. As it displays a message that is never fully finished, and there is no designated time one may spend with it, StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream fits right in with these themes, in my opinion. I have no clue at what point the “poem” within the tickboards turns over and starts from the beginning, but nonetheless, it seems to exist in a moment in time, only becoming richer the longer you stay and watch. I never expected a piece like this to create a similar experience to that of the Scarpa projects we saw. I really enjoyed getting to learn so much about time as a medium in so many different ways on our trip, with this artwork being the most surprising and unconventional exploration of that, by far.