At first glance you have the impression of entering a sort of contemporary temple. Of those created by some Japanese starchitect where the lines are hyper-essential and the details reduced to a minimum. Then everything changes and above all evolves. You immediately notice that the details are there and dot every square centimeter of the anthracite gray ceiling, going down almost to the floor. The initial effect of entering the Australian Pavilion, a highly deserved Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale curated by Ellie Buttrose, is more or less this. We speak in a low voice, as if driven by a form of respect. But for whom? The project signed by Archie Moore entitled “Kith and Kin” (“friends and relatives”) is as moving as it is ambitious. The artist with Aboriginal blood has created a giant family tree that traces the names of his ancestors. A conceptual monument that is a continuous work in progress, where other names, other presences can be added from time to time. A macramé of identity, imposing yet delicate.
Archie Moore / Kith and Kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024
“I became interested in genealogy and started looking in the archives for my mother’s Kamilaroi and Bigambul side and my father’s British and Scottish side. I came across material in libraries, newspapers, plats, pastoral diaries, historical societies, state archives, and oral histories from my family members. The data available on my Aboriginal side is lost much sooner than that on my European side, because the oral archive of the First Nations has been swept away by colonization.”
Archie Moore / Kith and Kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024
What Moore created is a sort of compensation for all the suffering faced by the natives over the centuries. It took the Toowoomba-born artist a month to write every single name, every single connection, on the walls. He thus created a very intricate graphic network thanks to which he put white on black (the effect is that of chalk on a blackboard) the connections of over 2,400 generations over 65,000 years of history. Three large black holes appear from time to time in the middle of the names, representing gaps in the lineage of the genealogical line. “Each of these blackouts – explains the artist – is the result of carnage, an epidemic, the destruction of documents and even a linguistic loss. Of the nearly 800 indigenous dialects that existed in Australia when the English landed there in 1770, around 150 survive today.”
Archie Moore / Kith and Kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024
There is a pinch of Opalka and a lot of Emilio Isgrò in this delicate and intense work of art, which finds its summa in the center of the large room. Here there is a black basin, a sort of memorial in memory of the injustices suffered by the natives. While it contains a large archive containing thousands of documents, especially coroner’s reports and colonial inquiries into the deaths of indigenous Australians in police custody, which Moore has selected to testify to the pain caused by continuous torture, incarceration and fighting in the name of social justice. There are many parts in which these documents appear incomplete or deleted: each gap tells of the atrocities inflicted on communities, the massacres, the introduction of diseases and the destruction of knowledge. Indelible wounds that continue to leave their mark today. “Despite making up just 3.8% of the Australian population,” Moore explains, “First Nations people represent 33% of the country’s prison population, making them one of the most incarcerated groups globally.”
Archie Moore / Kith and Kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024
In short, “Kith and Kin” is a work in perfect coherence with the spirit of the 2024 Biennale signed by Adriano Pedrosa, an event created with the aim of making up for lost time and shedding light on all those peoples and the massacres that remained for centuries in silence. “With this work – says the artist – I wanted to show that we are all linked on Earth by a larger network of kinship. A bit like what happens with the canals of Venice: the water out there goes into the lagoon, then into the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world, including the Australian continent, and this is another way to show our ties.”
