Visiting the National Pavilion Hãhãwpuá is an emotional experience, an example of de-identification from the very concept of nation. This begins with the name ‘Brazil,’ which the curators have replaced, a radical act both institutionally and historically in our era of identity fundamentalisms.
In the second room, as I read about artist Glicéria Tupinambá’s commitment to reclaim the Tupinambá cloak from the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, the mysterious expression Kalaallit Nunaat comes to mind, overlaid on Denmark that I noticed but couldn’t figure out a few minutes earlier on the brick walls of the Danish Pavilion. This, too, is a gesture of nationalist de-identification, establishing a mutual correspondence between pavilions and indigenous movements, from the North Pole to the Tropic of Capricorn. In the heart of the Venice Biennale, these gestures challenge and redefine the very borders of national identity.
A few meters away, another correspondence emerges, this time with opposing implications, between the Austrian and Serbian Pavilions, between the Swan Lake Rehearsals by Anna Jermolaewa, created in collaboration with Ukrainian choreographer Oksana Serheieva, and Aleksandar Denić’s Exposition Coloniale. The staging of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, broadcast in the Soviet Union as a form of entertainment to obscure political crises and street protests, is an anti-imperialist performance that wants to prepare us for a hoped fall of the Russian regime. The choice of the Austrian Ministry of Culture is a clear political message, detaching itself from the position of governments which are sometimes too indulgent towards the Kremlin’s aggression, as well as from the positions of civil society showing conflicting feelings on the subject.
A few steps further and I enter the scenographic installation of the Serbian Pavilion by Denić, with an opposite political atmosphere. Instantly skeptical of the title’s rhetoric, which I find outdated, I am confronted by the enormous sign reading Europa placed behind the public on the right side of the main hall, a gesture meant to recall the decline of the European narrative. The Pavilion aligns with the anti-European line of decolonial artistic and intellectual circles that seem to be pure state propaganda, worsened by the pavilion’s connection to Russia’s broader cultural and media attack against the idea of Europe and its liberal, social democratic institutions, intensified by Russian attack on Ukraine. The installation mirrors the Serbian government’s ambiguous attitude on its accession to the European Union, its aggressive attitude towards neighbouring Kosovo, entrenched in its increasingly reactionary Christian-orthodox ideology. This ambiguity also reflects the artist himself, who in the press release, despite his successful career and recognition in his homeland, describes himself as ‘permanently displaced,’ right in the heart of such a despised Europe where he has chosen to live and work.
After deciding not to waste more time on propaganda, a few minutes later I leave a highly tense political climate that vanishes as I enter the main exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere. This exhibition at the Venice Biennale was presented as a conquest of the Global South, a geopolitical category as much as a cultural one. For some months before the inauguration, the curator continued to underline the revolutionary, historical and political significance of his exhibition, obsessively defined as ‘provocative’. Insisting on the political importance of Foreigners Everywhere, combined with a pressing media preparation on this subject, was part of a meticulous work clearly aimed from the beginning at securing the exhibition’s media legacy as well as its place in the historiographical record of the Biennale. However, the public’s experience, which has been assumed to align inevitably with the curator’s vision, is far from predictable. The public’s freedom to feel and imagine regardless of curatorial intentions cannot be controlled. In fact, I perceived an incongruity between the declared revolutionary political gesture and the exhibition which, to me, felt devoid of its political potential. The alleged provocation turns out to be a harmless reassurance. Foreigners Everywhere is in fact a polite exhibition, designed to be appreciated by conservative institutional councils and directions. While it does act as a spokesperson for a movement of historical importance, aimed at rebalancing and reconnecting languages and cultures marginalized by colonial forces, it nonetheless silences any direct confrontation with the harmful social, ecological, and economic consequences, and especially the suffering inflicted on the peoples oppressed by colonizers, which is not visible at all in the selected works. And so, in the Contemporary Nucleus, the ‘category’ of indigenous peoples, foreigners in their own land, is represented by lyrical works chosen to meet the expectations of the art market and its patrons. Without recalling the history of the genocide that could have filled the Historical Nucleus, in the works of contemporary Amazonia there is no reference to the existential danger represented by the deforestation of indigenous lands for agriculture and wood production, partly destined for the European market, by the invasions of gold miners, the construction of new trans-Amazon highways, and the threat to the demarcation of indigenous lands, rights guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution but recently unjustly questioned by the National Congress. Such a disconnection from the tragic reality is summarized by the symbolic work by Claire Fontaine Foreigners Everywhere, neon sculptures that, according to the artists, refer to the crisis and condition of millions of refugees.
However, these sculptures seem sterilized by the very condition they aim to represent. This approach to the work of art contrasts to Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra, a work that touched on the same theme and was exhibited in the same location during Ralph Rugoff’s 58th Biennale Arte May You Live in Interesting Times. The choice of the Modernist Historical Nucleus is, in itself, indicative at a political level of the gap between Pedrosa’s declared intentions and the actual effectiveness of his choices. Instead of proposing works and artists condemned to invisibility or marginalized by cultural oligarchies, the curator chooses as his reference point the history of the Venice Biennale, particularly the modernist era, considering it as an opportunity to make a museum-like historical correction, even though the Biennale is not a museum and does not have a collection to rebalance. By inscribing artists who are already celebrated regionally into the history of the Venice Biennale and awarding them a certificate of participation as a career milestone, the curator opts to highlight established figures rather than including artists who are excluded and do not have institutional or historiographical recognition, whether on a regional or international level. Moreover, the choice of Modernist works, already historicized regionally and valued both institutionally and in the market, directly reflects a preference for the European canon. This choice implicitly prioritizes European artistic expressions over other different artistic expressions, that are historically rooted in the territories of the provinces, far from the intellectual circles of major cities in the Global South, the main victims of colonialism. In conclusion, the opportunity for emancipation and redemption has been lost.
The journey continues among the Pavilions, where Ruth Patir’s courageous and admirable non-opening has given a signal of response to the cultural haemorrhage of recent years, to the reactionary involution of Netanyahu government. On the other hand, the nineteenth-century colonial powers, above all England, France and the Netherlands, are looking for new paths to promote the cultures they colonized and despised in the past because they realized they needed to learn from them in order not to fall into cultural identity entropies. Italy ignores the need for this openness and awareness of collective responsibilities in the colonial past as shown by the National Pavilion at Arsenale. The art system does not indicate the way and takes refuge in a timeless lyrical meditation. The only exception is the precious documentary work Anatomy of a Friendship by Alessandra Ferrini which looms in an underpass of the Central Pavilion, representing the resistance fighter Omar al-Mukhtar executed by Italian forces after a heroic resistance to the invader. Russia, at the centre of the choreography of alliances of the global south, hosts the elegant exhibition of plurinational Bolivia. The idea of overcoming the concept of nation, strengthens its weight by multiplying its format, and hopes we will be able to overcome ‘the upheavals produced by colonialism through the understanding of history and the wise use of the lessons it gives’. A hope that in the contemporary decolonial intellectual tradition is valid for others but not for oneself, being host of an imperial power currently engaged in a bloody expansionist war in Ukraine.
Having come across again Denić’s Exposition Coloniale I hated so much at the beginning of my visit and taking advantage of the absence of people, I begin to walk through its small rooms smelling of mold and I am suddenly attracted by the colors faded up by time and the magic of the Juke Box that plays the music Europa interpreted by Boki Milosević, interrupted by the regular ringing of the nearby telephone booth. Suddenly I am captured by a siren song, an enchanting melody that I used to listen to as a child when I wasn’t able to understand its text yet.
I’d like to buy the world
a Coke
and keep it company
…
That’s the real thing
What the world wants today
…
a Coke
In art and propaganda, making is more important than intentions, and the masterpiece has an irresistible symbolic power that manages to overwhelm reality. It is so seductive, enveloping and dangerous that we can’t feel indifferent towards it, that’s the reason why it is so dear to power and so essential to politics.
