At Venice Immersive, the Ruins of the West Bank and 17th-Century Amsterdam

Venice Immersive, the extended-reality section of the Venice film festival, drew to a close this week with a programme the Guardian described as running from the frivolous to the serious. The paper's account names installations that take visitors from the ruins of the West Bank to 17th-century Amsterdam, alongside works on the impact of climate change and, in its words, virtual nosy passersby. The first installation a visitor encounters, the Guardian wrote, is a chest-high piece that sets the tone for the showcase.

The Guardian noted a detail that distinguishes this edition from previous ones: the exhibits live on. Immersive work has historically been the most ephemeral part of a festival, assembled for a few days and dismantled, and the paper's report treats the survival of this year's pieces as the news. The section is described as the film festival's reliably head-spinning showcase for new media, a phrase that carries both the section's reputation and its problem — work that resists being written about in the ordinary language of film criticism.

The Guardian's own framing of the programme is a judgement about curation rather than a report of a single event, and La Veduta reports it as such. What the wire supports is a closing, a list of themes, and a claim about the exhibits' afterlife. The broader point for readers abroad is that the Lido's most experimental corner is now the one most likely to outlast the festival that hosts it.

The regional lens here is the one the foreign coverage itself supplies. The Venice Biennale's film festival has spent recent years building a section for work that has no settled home in cinemas or museums, and the foreign press now treats that section as part of the festival's public face rather than a side room. The Guardian's report is written for readers who will never put on a headset at the Lido; it describes the installations by their subjects — a ruined landscape, a seventeenth-century city, a changing climate — because that is the only vocabulary available to a newspaper.

That vocabulary problem is the real story for a culture desk. Extended reality has been promised as the next medium for more than a decade, and the difficulty of reviewing it in print has not gone away. The Guardian's solution, in this piece, is to report what the works are about and to note that they will remain available after the festival, which is a modest but meaningful shift: it turns a festival programme into a catalogue with a life beyond the closing night.

For Italy, the consequence is the one the sources bear out and no more. Venice is the venue, and the Biennale is the institution that stages this work; the foreign press reads the section as evidence of what the festival is willing to host. Whether that translates into audiences, funding or a permanent home for immersive work is not something the cited coverage states, and La Veduta does not assert it. The paper's report leaves the question open, which is where it stands.

What follows the closing is the ordinary aftermath of a festival: the works disperse, the prizes are argued over, and the autumn's museum and gallery calendars take over. Readers who followed Venice through the foreign wires this fortnight will find the film awards covered elsewhere on this desk; the immersive section's fate is the quieter thread, and the Guardian is one of the few foreign outlets still pulling on it.