©Marco Cappelletti
A land register of contemporaneity is staged at Monte di Pietà
Conceived as an immersive installation, pawnshop consists of staging a failing pawn shop, in-depth investigation of the concept of debt as the root of human society and the primary vehicle through which political and economic power is exercised. Indeed, what better place than Venice – a historic crossroads of trade – and, in particular, Ca’ Corner della Regina, home to the ancient Venetian Monte di Pietà from 1834 to 1969, to stage this register of contemporaneity?
It is also a criticism of the art system
Through a studied stratification, full of references and hidden echoes that develop from the ground floor, to the mezzanine, up to the main floor of the building, Büchel, no stranger to this type of provocation, stages Venetian history, based on the close between money and debt, between expansion and accumulation. Including, within it, also a very ferocious and subtle criticism of the art system and the assignment of a symbolic and economic value to goods and objects. In fact, we remember the artist Christoph Büchel softly for that installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale in which he transformed a former deconsecrated Catholic church into an Islamic mosque. Or when, four years later, he again exhibited in Venice Our boata shipwrecked ship with hundreds of migrants on board.
