I too am a foreigner everywhere. But above all while I walk through the Arsenale in this art Biennale which celebrates strangeness as a value to hold on to in order to understand an exploded, crumpled, multifaceted world. Too many unknown names, too many techniques that my reasoning as a white intellectual relegates to the world of craftsmanship, too many myths that I don’t know and all too recognizable figurines, too many languages that are naïve if not folkloric for me (always due to my vices of Eurocentric thought).
Pedrosa’s exhibition at the Gardens
Yet, at the Giardini I felt at home, reconciled with the curator Adriano Pedrosa who had announced an international exhibition with a strong presence of artefacts, textile art and entire families of artists/artisans – something which had made me approach the Central Pavilion with low expectations. . It was a surprise, however, to see how everything was divided into themes and rooms that helped my understanding as a European visitor, rusty on categories of thought that still reek of the twentieth century, avant-garde and conceptualization of art.
A room dedicated to abstraction was followed by one entirely filled with portraits arranged like a picture gallery; from a focus on painting queer we switched to a political station with videos that bordered on reportage. Monographic oases were proposed in the form of exhibitions or thematic installations such as the unmissable “Museum of the Old Colony” in Paulo Delano which tells in images five centuries of painful colonial history of Puerto Rico. Or the beautiful room of Giulia Andreani (which I didn’t know, I admit) from Payne’s large gray painted canvases which speak of the dawn of feminism in dialogue with a masterpiece of art brut “Crucifixion of the Soul” from 1936 by the self-taught artist Madge Gill. Or the few and intense photos of Claudia Andujar (I knew her!) who with a metaphysical black and white respond to the childish and symbolic drawings of the Yanomami artists and shamans, a tribe that becomes the source and inspiration of his complex work.
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The Biennale at the Arsenale
This organized pace made me feel part of a complex world and helped me understand it. Then everything got confused again at the Arsenale. In the triumph of colors and techniques, between Africa, the Americas and the Antipodes, the polychrome universe set up by Pedrosa dances before my eyes.
“If you were South American you would understand,” two people close to me who live in South America tell me.
Perhaps. But a curator shouldn’t provide me with the tools to orient myself even if I was born in Rome, a city that is a symbol of Western imperial history; although, I grew up in a Nato country and studied on texts steeped in white and dominant culture?
I can’t find these tools. The labels follow one another like the works and the historical nuclei (the one that reproduces paintings by expatriate Italian painters where only the splendid displays by Lina Bo Bardi are saved is terrible) are not easily distinguishable from modern and contemporary works
The truth is that I ultimately take refuge in what I know as theArchive of disobedience that I encounter in the first half of the journey. It is a video atlas that collects images of actions, riots, counter-information and resistance practices ranging from gender problems to climate or social ones. She cured him Marco Scotini with its now proven ability to stage the archives and is worth a long stop. I can say the same about the work of Bouchra Khalili which in a multi-screen installation records the movement of migrants on geographical maps, while the protagonist narrates his story step by step in a voice-over. But despite his North African name, Bouchra Khalilu studied cinema at the Sorbonne and art at the Ecole Nationale Superieure in Paris-Cergy, so it is obvious that I have no difficulty in stopping and embracing his work with sympathy. We speak the same language.
The problem, therefore, is not these works, nor the well-shot films or videos that punctuate the route and which come from perhaps second or third generation immigrant filmmakers returning from excellent film schools in Paris or London.
The geographical pastiche at the Biennale
The problem is the landscapes and villages painted on linen by meticulous Aboriginal or Guatemalan talents; they are the collectives of self-taught women who embroider fabrics with wool, or the unknown Chilean artists who design jute bags or the African textile geometries which are easily confused with beautiful carpets. The problem is the geographical pastiche prevents me from understanding the difference between Central American and African textile art. Yet among techniques, cultures, myths…. there will be something to separate and build a cataloguing, a chronology, a systematization of all this.
In short, what paradigm does this cheerful, lively and colorful Arsenal-long tracking shot go through? What remains at the end of a journey if I cannot transform it into an experience of culture and history? It’s my fault? Or of those who do not enable me to metabolise, elaborate a thought and leave me only the option of giving in to passive acceptance or worse to the only category I have left: the question of whether I like it or not…?
The Golden Lions at the Biennale
Yet, I don’t feel alone in having these doubts. Ultimately, it comforts me to note that the claim of this artisanal and popular culture that capital art has made “foreign everywhere” did not make its way into the hearts of the jury.
The sophisticated is certainly not naive Anna Maria Maiolinoneither Karimah AshaduNigerian origin but born in London who not surprisingly won the Silver Lion with a video on motorbike taxis in Lagos made after having trained at the Chelsea College of Art. And it is difficult to classify the work of the artist as artisanal Mataaho Collective with that perfection of design and the structural strength of an architecture.
But above all, for years now and then Australia has brought punctiform Aboriginal painting to its pavilion, yet the only time it wins a well-deserved Golden Lion is precisely in the Biennial where its artist Archie Moore (descendant of the Kamilaroi and Bigambul peoples), creates a conceptual installation where there is no trace of spontaneity. It is an inventory of thousands of names of ancestors among those who lived in the 65 thousand years preceding the “discovery” of Australia, which with great formal rigor and a stronger visual and emotional impact does not at all want to claim indigenous creativity, but instead aims to reconstruct its History.
Alessandra Mammì
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