With an artistic production overly open and pluralistic, Foreigners Everywhere seems to address an ongoing global cultural decolonization effort, reminiscent of the initiative undertaken at a national level by the Italy Pavilion in 2011.
In 2011 the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale entitled Art is not Cosa Nostra questioned the hierarchy of values of the ‘mafia’ art system and the very figure of the curator of the Biennial who with his personal decisions would influence the global perception on the state of contemporary art and its trends. In controversy with this centralization of power, the curatorial choice was to pulverize the decision-making centers and involve 275 ‘intellectuals’ called to select as many artists. My personal memory of the visit was that of a pavilion similar to a warehouse of works intended for teleshopping and it was disheartening to see the artworks presented suffocated under the shadow of a political project of dizzying mapping of the territory which, to keep many happy, devalued everyone. The attempt of that pavilion to correct a ‘defect of identity’, the belonging or not to a certain clan, and present a more open and pluralistic cultural production, a sort of decolonialism internal to Italian culture, in retrospect and in light of the events of the years 10, seems to have been the precursor at a national level of the important international movement that pushed museums to integrate their collections with works by artists descending from unrepresented cultures and contexts, to correct a historical reality perceived as the result of prejudices and structurally unjust. My feeling, already from the short interview on February 2nd, is that Pedrosa has made this trend his own by renouncing to offer his vision on the state of contemporary art, as is expected from a curator of the Venice Biennale, concentrating his narrative efforts to inscribe his name in the own history of the Biennale as the one who corrected it by denouncing its Eurocentrism, guilty of having snubbed valuable artists, especially modernists, ignored because not Western. To remember this historical fact, in each biography of the artists on display it is promptly mentioned, when is the case, the fact that the work is ‘exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale’.
Compared to the Italian experience, Pedrosa’s exhibition does not have the plurality of voices, but it certainly stands out for the elegance of the setup which masterfully made so enjoyable a pinacoteca so rich in works collected under the title Foreigners Everywhere, certainly the most successful choice and the most powerful message of this 60th Biennial. The effectiveness of this combination of words opens up different interpretative paths and meanings, to a place of encounters, a point of arrival and departure at the same time. The strength of the title, however, highlights the corresponding weakness of the narrative built around it, empty of contents that correspond to the declared purposes. Emblematic is the gesture of double appropriation that the artists Claire Fontaine and the curator Pedrosa celebrate, and which to date lacks the involvement of the Turin based anarchist collective, author of the title. The double appropriation turns out to be an operation that takes from the subalterns, the authors unknown to the public who remain so, without an attempt to restore their visibility and relevance. And while Claire Fontaine does not go beyond the strength of the appropriate words, actually emptying them of power in the now alienated language of colored neon, Pedrosa’s gaze turned to the past creates a cumbersome absence, the compromise with the present in which we live, where the 127 millions of refugees, doubled in the last ten years, are radically ignored in the exhibition despite being at the center of its rhetoric. These unforgivable absences, however, do not diminish the importance of this exhibition, which in my opinion is necessary more for the possibility offered to the European public to emancipate themselves from their own expectations, than for the opportunity offered to the artists presented to be celebrated in the temple of Western art. The rediscussion of the values of a more inclusive contemporary art and its openness to different cultures has been a constant effort of the cycle of Bienniali directed by Baratta. In Palazzo Enciclopedico for example, the charm of Hilma af Klint’s works, in addition to the enchantment offered to the public, have rewritten the history of the origins of Western abstract painting previously attributed, due to gender prejudice, to Kandinsky. The poignant visionary obsession of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, an immense artist locked up for years in the double prison of the stigma of mental illness, showed how intentionality in the creative process had historically been defined in a reductivist and short-sighted way by curators, theorists and judges of western art. These significant examples of ongoing change and openness have always emerged within the logic of a center that has conceded space to proposals coming from the periphery, ‘discovering’ and valorizing new languages compatible with the contemporary art platform, the control of which has remained centralized in the phase of geopolitical and financial expansion.
The case of Pedrosa’s biennial is different, as it directly challenges on an ideological level the cultural hegemony of contemporary art as it was invented in the West, questioning its historical prejudices, the universalist canons which in Foreigners Everywhere were dismissed without complexes and with the arrogance necessary for such an operation. The network of foundations, institutions, galleries and collectors involved in supporting the Brazilian curator’s project has reached such an economic and ideological weight that it did not need the consent and blessing of the centre. The Eurocentric cultural system, threatened by the emancipation of the South, conquered and not conceded, reacts with critic and commentators, still tied to the hierarchies of their small ancient world, who attempt to stigmatize the exhibition calling it folkloric. Beyond its particular aspects, the very existence of the Foreigners Everywhere exhibition presents in a striking way with an alternative repertoire, a possibility of diversity of canons and value systems. Crossing the Arsenal and being captured by Rosa Elena Curruchich’s miniatures is an experience that does not need to be judged according to the tastes of the members of an exclusive private club, it has its own dimension that has the same relevance as the encounter with the work of Robert Rauschenberg, which from a geopolitical privilege flourished. Necessary is denouncing the system of value attribution in the narratives of the history of contemporary art as it has been told so far, linked to the power of those who told them, created by the few for the few, oligarchies with enormous conflicts of interest. The hope is that this horizontal rebalancing does not turn out to be just a new short anthropophagic adventure of a market that is always in need of novelty and change, of renewed ideologies that justify new pockets of speculation.
