I am writing to you from the Venice Art Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere.” Migrants, peripherals, and all that. queer was the protagonist. This year, for the first time in the history of the Biennial, a Latin American curator took the stage. It was Adriano Pedrossa’s turn, a Brazilian and current artistic director of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. Despite the geographical proximity, I wonder when it will be the turn of a woman from the global south.
A monumental mural by the Amazonian collective Makhu welcomed us. This first immersion in the central pavilion was full of migratory, feminine art and ancestral cosmogonies.
A complete room for the Colombian indigenous artist Abel Rodríguez, in co-creation with his son Wilson. A work by the master Alejandro Obregón and Enrique Grau exhibited for the first time in the history of the Biennial. A loom by Olga Amaral and an installation by Daniel Otero, among others, marked a Colombian milestone.
We spent whole days at the Giardini, the gardens and the vast Arsenal. More than just an art show or a trade fair, the Venice Biennale, since its inception, has remained a sensitive epicentre of the world’s current geopolitics, the collective unconscious and new worldviews.
The Israeli Pavilion was closed with a sign announcing that Israeli artists and curators were not opening until a ceasefire was reached in Gaza. In Denmark, the representative was Inuuteq Storch, a Greenlandic and Inuk photographer, with an intimate exhibition of images of his family. The Australian Pavilion took home the Golden Lion, the Biennial’s most important award, with the installation of the Maori Mataaho tribe, who traced their genealogical map. My favourite pavilion was Japan, represented by Yuko Mohri, an artist who plays with spatial sensitivity through delicate sound and light sculptures created from the decomposition of fresh fruits.
At the end of the tour we find a living space taken over by weeds – or rather “goodness” – with wild and migratory plants. There in that space was installed “Rest”, the anti-monument by Iván Argote, a Colombian artist very well positioned in France and the United States. The limestone sculpture is a copy of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Plaza Colón in Madrid. The face and bust, the cross he carries in his hand, and the sculpted suit dress in power and dominance. Argote questions the history of our “discoverers” and invites us to blur the foreign landscape of our roots. From April, when the Biennial began, until now in July, the wild nature in which “Rest” is installed does not stop emerging. This is without a doubt the most transcendental work of this edition of the Biennial, the most evocative of migration in the new eco-social narratives.
This Biennial left me with many feelings, as well as the motherhood that I am experiencing for the second time today. What are the new narratives that I must share with my daughter Ágata and with the life that will soon be born? Remember that I will continue in Residence in Paris, but I will write to you soon. I have a lot to tell you about what I experienced with Chloé Latour and Jean-Pierre Seyvos.
2024-07-12 15:41:34