Young South African Gabrielle Goliath, a featured artist in the exhibition Foreigners Everywhere curated by Adriano Pedrosa, is one of the rare artists at the 2024 Biennale Arte to have a room of her own in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini.
In the room, everything is blue. The videos with blue backgrounds are placed on the floor, bringing visitors directly into contact with the faces of people who murmur, stutter, twist their hands, and attempt to read, but the voice does not come out; it is just a stutter that struggles to take shape and remains suspended. The project is called Personal Accounts, created in 2014 to address inequalities, violence, and oppression. These are testimonies from people of color, trans, queer, and non-binary individuals, who in their dramatic murmurs cannot even find the words to describe the horror of the violence and traumas they have endured. The work highlights the politics of gender, sexual, and domestic violence; as an act of censorship, the words are erased, leaving an infinite void, a dialogue of absences and gaps, where it becomes evident who can speak and who must be silenced. You can swallow, clear your throat, sigh, lower your eyes. Present and powerful, the bodies of these people fill the screen, in this blue background that emphasizes the beauty of the images amidst the tragedy of the stories, which we can only imagine, as the erasure of words prevents a true “vocal” narrative.
One of the works that compose the project is a 2024 four-channel video titled There’s a river of birds in migration, based on a poem written, composed, and performed for the occasion by the artist, and activist Treyvone Moo. Together with Treyvone, we see Maneo, Sapphire, and Hopewell, all sharing personal stories about the precariousness and survival of trans individuals in Johannesburg and South Africa, where anti-Black, anti-female, homophobic, and transphobic violence is a daily and pervasive reality. However, these personal accounts transcend the conditions of denial from which they are spoken, read, and sung. Alongside the pain, disappointment, fears, and losses, there is also the assertion of hope, creativity, beauty, community, poetry, desire, generosity, faith, transition, love, and, perhaps most emphatically, presence.
In another video, Deinde Falase, the Nigerian television journalist, recounts his escape to South Africa from his homeland following the 2014 law that prohibited same-sex marriages and relationships, only to find himself in the same situation ten years later as a refugee without any rights.
Lago di Como was filmed in the affluent and beautiful Italian city, an idyll of wealth, villas, and the good life, but simultaneously a place of arrival and departure for migrants with precarious jobs and no rights, to which women are increasingly exposed, particularly suffering from domestic violence. Each year, the Telefono Donna (a helpline for women) in Como records over 250 cases of gender and sexual violence among immigrants from Africa, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Albania. The violence starkly contrasts with the beauty of the location; the face of Zohra and the photo books speak with the eyes of these women’s despair.
