The poet Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and was expelled from his country in 1972, after which he settled in the United States. From there he traveled again and again to Venice. He visited it for the first time at the age of 32, and at the time he wrote the wonderful little book Watermark (Siruela/Vienna) he had already stayed in the city 17 times, always in December. For the Nobel, seeing a wave breaking on the shore at midnight was like “seeing time emerging from the water.” Memory, death, love, beauty, dreams are also the materials that, in a subtle and poetic way, the artist Claudia Pagès unfolds in the Cantieri Navali, the usual headquarters of Catalonia at the Venice Art Biennale, where this year she presents Paper tears (Lágrimas de papel), a waltz-paced installation created from 15th-century watermarks found in the Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, the place where she was born.