Despite the group exhibition at the Zimbabwean Pavilion being centered on the “concept of kududunuka: an exploration of ideas that signify the disintegration of the world,” the works on display exhibit a positive, practical, and effective attitude.
Venice is crossed by the stories of travelers who have navigated here for centuries, overlapping echoes of generations always in transit between east, southeast, and west. Each ‘calle’, depending on the time of day and season, has a hidden potential, a call to the foreign passerby coming from the adjacent canal. The fortune is being intercepted by these interferences and following them as far as you can hear them. It was this way, by chance, that I ended up in the courtyard of Santa Maria della Pietà, where my attention was drawn to a construction of thick straw walls surrounding a Venetian naturalized palm tree. Next to this installation, a new unexpected journey began. After visiting the beautiful exhibition of photographer Peter Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death – with the marvelous photo of Susan Sontag – I proceeded to the Zimbabwe Pavilion, on the second floor of the building in a completely different environment.
The Biennale is always rich with treasures from all over the world, artists who bring with them the talismans of their culture, finding in the Lagoon a noble floor, a precious, mostly unknown garden where they can feel at home for the season. The welcome at the Zimbabwe Pavilion reminds me that hospitality is an important cultural trait often overlooked in many pavilions. At the entrance, I am welcomed by a very knowledgeable, energetic young Zimbabwean, always present in the conversation. The same honesty and vitality seem to be an important characteristic of all the artists on display. Despite reading in a press release that the group exhibition, titled Undone, is centered on the “concept of kududunuka: an exploration of ideas that signify the disintegration of the world,” the works on display exhibit a positive, practical, and effective attitude, which prevails over curatorial readings and texts that frame works of art within Eurocentric ideological categories.
The setup is minimal, it’s very hot, and at the entrance, there are works by Gillian Rosselli. The silicone works by Troy Makaza are interesting, followed by pieces from Kombo Chapfika, Sekai Machache, and Victor Nyakauru. However, the real encounter is with the complex creations of Moffat Takadiwa, which in my opinion encapsulate the ecological spirit of the exhibition and the community it represents. His works address global environmental and inequality issues from the opposite side of the scale, with the attitude of those who can always find solutions where others would give up. His is a successful case of upcycling, capable of giving value back to waste, a noble and exemplary response to the tons of garbage dumped in African territory. The artist uses fabrics, belts, zippers, and buttons collected from a factory that processes textile waste sent from wealthy countries, reorganized and paired with flexible frameworks made of toothbrushes and, above all, computer keys.
Takadiwa adapts to the tastes and expectations that the art public has developed towards Africa, starting with successful artists like El Anatsui and more recently Serge Clottey. In the social context of our days, his creative gesture reminds me of many Italo-Africans, young people who don’t select garbage in African landfills, but collect it in the landfills of our cities, living, when lucky, in an integrated yet subordinate manner. They share the poor side of an Italian life, working and gathering everything they can value from everywhere, giving up all the comfort they would have earned with their labor, to pay for containers full of waste that can bring some comfort to their loved ones in that distant Africa, which is within us.
