🇬🇧 Hosted By: Paola Carimati
Uncomfortable Thought - How the inauguration of the 61st Venice Art Biennale brought back to the surface a fragility that calls the stability of the system itself into question
«What you truly love remains, the rest is slag», are the words recited by Ottavia Piccolo for the press opening of the 61st Venice Art Biennale. Authentic words, free of any respectability, not chosen by chance to underline how love, in a higher sense, and respect for cultural traditions are fundamental for the survival of an institution. Especially in times like these, in which the inversion of values and of the perception of the world order is rewriting geopolitical balances.
I listen to them on my way back from the Lagoon: two days are not enough, but certainly necessary to frame the event and understand what remains for the public beyond the exclusive clamour of the inauguration. In order: a popular prize established in place of the one that should have been awarded by the resigned jury; a Russian pavilion open, but closed to visitors; the Israeli and American pavilions deserted by the public; the promise of the opening of the Iranian one, but not for the entire duration of the exhibition.
And yet, of the references to Ezra Pound’s Canti Pisani at the Piccolo Arsenale Theatre, little more remains than an ANSA news flash. After all, putting order in the syncopated flow of occupations, strikes and protests is not simple. Especially when what is happening takes on an exceptional character: it was in fact since 1968 that the very architecture of the Biennale had not been so openly questioned, already accused then of elitism and profit orientation, and criticized for its hierarchical award mechanisms.
That Pussy Riot occupied the Giardini, that marches and performances crossed the alleys around the Arsenale and Via Garibaldi, and that the doors of the pavilions remained closed during the first workers’ strike in the history of the event, are concrete facts that, almost sixty years later, confirm a partially crystallized situation. They reveal a collective malaise not reducible to a simple clash of egos — to quote Ezra Pound again. The question is inevitable: is it time to rethink the participatory model of the Biennale?
Meanwhile, the Chinese artist Yang Yexin scatters part of his thousand gold grains among the flowerbeds of the Giardini, inviting the public to ask whether one comes to Venice «for art or for gold», over seventy artists declare they do not recognize the legitimacy of the Golden Lion awarded by the public. A significant fracture, not so much because I too, as an entitled voter, voted, but for a question of coherence with what art should be: a space capable of questioning the status quo, stimulating critical thought and fostering empathy.
«Approximately one hundred countries participate today in the Biennale, in compliance with national and international law», the president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco reminded the more than 4000 professionals involved. Denying this would place the institution on the same level as those countries that are repeatedly violating it. And we all agree that it is not true that “international law applies, but only up to a certain point”, right?
«The Biennale is not a tribunal», he added: «It is, since 1895, the year of its foundation, a place where one exhibits, discusses, listens». Words difficult to separate from the images of Gaza and from the stories of child abuse in prisons collected by Save the Children.
But we are children of the Enlightenment and cannot renounce a posture of coherence. «I am surprised that the world born from the French Revolution, from secularism and from the will to build a complete democracy, has turned into its opposite: a laboratory of intolerance, censorship and exclusion». It is legitimate to ask: «how did we end up discussing who should be there and who should not, who represents what and what guilt they carry, while real wars and tragedies are ongoing? With civilians dying more than in a past in which we believed we had closed the chapter on abomination. We do not want to admit it, but there are communities that have reinstated the death penalty», again words that speak of violence, genocide, Gaza.
Of the 29 national participations in the Giardini, 25 at the Arsenale, 46 in the historic centre, 7 are new, each with its own story guaranteed by the aforementioned right: the hereditary absolute monarchy of Qatar, which entrusted the project for the temporary pavilion to the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija; the Republic of Guinea and Equatorial Guinea, defined by international observers respectively as a hybrid regime (or in transition) and, the second, formally presidential but in reality a dominant-party regime; the Republic of Nauru, in the central Pacific Ocean, one of the smallest countries in the world; the fragile Federal Republic of Somalia; and the presidential Republic of El Salvador. «Let us not dwell on affiliations», insists Buttafuoco. «Let us not lose sight of the Moon».
The Biennale, despite its inevitably asymmetrical structure, still tries to represent the world as it is: fragmented, conflictual, marked by a global war that knocks on everyone’s daily life. «Closing the door to someone makes it harder to open it for others. If the Biennale were to start selecting not artworks but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be the place where the world meets». It is an uncomfortable position, but a central one: complexity is not governed by polarizing the debate, but by taking responsibility for the tensions that question the present.
But let us turn to In Minor Keys, the project of the late Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition does not simplify: it stratifies. The collective work of the curatorial team has built an ecosystem of spaces, relationships and different sensibilities that transform the Biennale into a place of crossing rather than representation. An archipelago of oases, courtyards and residences, but also “houses”, inside and outside the institution: from Kunsthaus Paradiso, the house within the house curated by Caroline Corbetta at Palazzo Molin Querini, to the expanded and collective domestic space of Chiara Camoni at the Italian Pavilion, up to the dystopian dimension of Florentina Holzinger, who metaphorically drowns Austria and its artists in vats of bodily fluids.
Also significant is the work of Walid Raad, built over more than thirty years: Far from quieting is a sequence of trompe-l’œil paintings and drawings illustrating the shelters of Yasser Arafat. «It is said that the PLO leader never slept in the same bed for two nights in a row. Having survived more than forty assassination attempts, he could not afford to lower his guard», and so he lived — and slept — always in motion. In this horizon, the home becomes an unstable place, a shifting space, a human condition rather than an architecture.
This is why the 110 invited artists do not claim the still-open fractures between the Global North and South, highlighted also by the aesthetic codes of the pavilions, but inhabit them with lucid awareness: the works on display observe, record, and return in relation to the public. The installation by Wolff Architects is a lateral art, far from traditional centres of legitimization, which precisely in the gap, in what until now has not been loved (re-quoting Pound), finds its strength.
At the entrance of the Giardini and the Arsenale, the installation Soft Offerings to Silenced Voices and to All Who Have Turned to Dust by Otobong Nkangale and the verses from If I Must Die, the collection of poems written by Refaat al-Areer, killed in Gaza in December 2023 during an Israeli bombing, are introductory works functioning as perceptual thresholds. The visitor is warned: what follows requires time, attention, permanence.
Forward, let us enter. In the Central Pavilion, regenerated by Labics, the clay sculptures of Seyni Awa Camara seem to emerge from a world suspended between semi-consciousness and wakefulness: a ritual gathering that precedes the interspecies communication staged by the Peruvian artist and activist Célia Vàsquez Yui. Her The Council of the Mother spirit of the Animals is an imaginative parliament of zoomorphic sculptures whose history draws on a spiritual conception of ecology, according to which each species has a mother spirit. Nearby, María Magdalena Campos-Pons in Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison portrays respectively the first African woman curator of the Art Biennale and the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and focuses on the frequency of storytelling, while Buhlebezwe Siwani interrogates colonialism, history and the representation of the Black female body. The curatorial gesture is clear: it no longer aims only to show, but to involve.
Also central in the development of the narrative at the Arsenale is the choice to alternate fragrances, sounds and immersive devices. The practices of Daniel Lind-Ramos and Guadalupe Maravilla, for example, both work on trauma and collective memory: the former through assemblages of recovered materials linked to Caribbean history, the latter transforming his own biographical and clinical experience into a sonic ritual. Garden of the Broken Hearted by Theo Eshetu instead stages an olive tree traversed by projections that dematerialize it, bringing the gaze back to the violence we consume daily on screens. Next to it, Khaled Sabsabi builds a contemplative space inspired by Islamic mystical tradition.
From Lebanon to Marseille: Mohammed Joha, inspired by the practices of the Gazan brothers trapped in cycles of endless destruction and reconstruction, overlays scrap materials that he transforms into canvas works. The series No Shelter was born while on his TV screen the images of the near-total annihilation of Gaza were playing: the layers of collage he composes release an emotional charge that moves. It is called empathy, a word in some sense exhausted for us Westerners, and of which we desperately need. To save the world from ourselves and for others. On the ground, posters of protest, some still legible, others trampled and violated as if they were bodies.
But the system, despite everything, remains open: a work that does not seek synthesis, but welcomes all points of view. To shake, to listen, and then, hopefully, to act again.