After a year of easing into his role of Venice Biennale President, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco begins to confidently impart his touch to the institution he presides.
He started with the word – the verb – used in its philosophical essence to render the deep sense of his curatorial and content choices in the several sectors of the Biennale. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is an interpreter of the cultural density that propels this complex machinery of modernity, and discreetly second-chairs curatorships to add his personal, welcome touch.
Your first year as President of the most important cultural institution in Italy.
There is no way for me to be definite about my experience at the Biennale after only one year. All I can say is that my attitude is one of responsible vigil. I think it is more appropriate for others to judge what I do, and this will of course include my work in this first year. As a person, I can say I feel deep satisfaction, and I feel bewitched by this wonderful experience. I had the opportunity to meet colleagues who took me to a higher level of formation, knowledge, and ability to learn. I am truly enthusiastic.
The Biennale: unexpected surprises and reassuring certainties.
What surprised me the most is, in fact, what I had hopes I would find and eventually did: a real bottega, a veritable Renaissance bottega that fits perfectly in the contemporary art world. This bottega, or workshop, is a place where the several disciplines agree on offering us and our time a perspective to decipher, interpret, address the evolution of our very context. Something I did expect was a mine of memories and materials that I could use to connect the threads of a discourse that all too often is left to specialism, but that truly deserves being used by anyone who wishes to immerse in the multiform world of culture. In this sense, Venice plays an essential role.
Unlike many other, however beautiful, urban centres in the world, Venice and its uniqueness also live on the power of their cultural institutions, which is perfectly consistent with the city’s genius loci. Venice is a study centre open to anyone who wishes to use it. Even the masses of tourists that visit every day can spontaneously choose to feed their curiosity. It’s like pollination, an eternal spring of beautiful life.
Your role as President of the Venice Biennale.
I’m a sponge, really. I absorb everything I touch and release its essence little by little in forced harmony with the territory around me, with the history of this city, and with its unrivalled vantage point. I don’t know if there’s a style that I can use to tell the story of the Biennale. Everything shows for itself. The Biennale was born for a given need. Allowing Venice to become the meeting point between those know how to make art and those who know how to love it. Over 130 years of history prove how well this is carried out.
I often meet my colleagues here, in the colonnade hall, to share ideas under the sign of mutual listening and confrontation. Walking into these rooms, meeting people, absorbing instants, inspirations, opinions is so beautiful.
Some projects do not perfectly match into any of the six main sectors of the Biennale.
Let’s start from a section that is actually there, our historical archive. If anything, for its being a thesaurus of memories, materials, documents. It is an active study centre that is open to the public, to artists, to those who have vision and want to explore new territories. Words are a canon that we are all asked to question. The experiment I made with the Expositio Sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem is a chapter that was born out of this cultural workshop at the Biennale. By stepping outside of ourselves, we proved that this attempt to capture a masterpiece of German theological Latin literature reached its audience effortlessly, with no need of learned erudition, making it a piece of art that is truly accessible by everyone.
Undoubtedly, there are other directions the Biennale can follow. Incessant research of new expressive modes is an essential part of its beauty. Not being restricted to a given schematic, too. A process, a path, that started with Eckhart and made us more aware that we need to investigate expressivity at the frontiers of art.
If we are looking forward to a Word Biennale, this project is a new, essential piece of it. This incessant process of elaboration and creation needs words to document, to print theory and reflection, to memorialize the studies the underpin modern art production. The Biennale has more than just visitors: they are enthusiasts, attentive, and passionate. Hence our decision to bring back to life the historical Biennale Magazine, 53 years after its latest issues, and we are very proud of that.
The relationship between Venice and the Biennale.
It is a complex, fascinating relationship. This year, we celebrate Marco Polo’s 700-year anniversary, which we shouldn’t write up as a mere recurrence, floating on past glory, but we should turn into a seed for future projects. We will trace Marco Polo’s travels and look at them through the lens of modern art, which in turn will allow us and the Biennale to grow past its known borders and meet the world, meet the future. Now that history is speeding forward, Venice and the Biennale can elaborate Marco Polo’s epos on the background of the great Eurasia, a place that tells a story of youth, energy, future, evolution, technology, whereas on the contrary, in a different part of the world, all of that seems to be shrinking. Being connected with these horizons is a good think for art especially, though also for economy and commerce, because we all know that where art lives, therein is a sense of change, of ability to appropriate historical momentum. When we think of the Renaissance, we must think of it in a circular sense: art, yes, though also economy, exchange, work. In short: workshops, again, maybe digital workshops, but at any rate, places where things are made and ideas elaborated.
Picking Carlo Ratti as the curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
My predecessor Roberto Cicutto and I picked Ratti because of his education, his professionalism, and his versatility in relating to different disciplines. He is the best pick for science’s needs, too, since it is a perimeter that architecture and urbanism hasn’t fully developed its experimentation potential.
I examined his work in the aerospace sector. I loved his designs. Most notably, I loved the way he took a step forward in a discipline as open and porous as architecture needs to be. Never as much as today we need a kind of architecture that knows how to dialogue with new sciences and new languages both digital and non-, all of whom revolutionize our daily lives.
A definition of Intelligens.
Bees are intelligent, and I believe that from the point of view of natural, artificial, collective intelligence, bees are a veritable urbanistic society, something we should study. Beehive urbanism, with its dwelling pods, are absolute intelligence. The same can be said of beavers, which are uniquely able to build robust dams. What I personally believe is that what makes animals different from us is our ability to determine catastrophes and errors, as is our ability to face issues that are so much larger than ourselves, issues that feel almost insurmountable. An example: if we were to look at footage of an earthquake, not one happening in a city, but in nature, we would almost feel soothed. We would see trees shaking and water rippling up the minute everything resets in placid awareness of what was and of what took place. We are more than intelligence, though: we are spirit, error, research. As we walked through history from shelter to building, we questioned our every effort to ascribe part of our intelligence to higher needs – those of decorative haughtiness – though in essence it Is reduced to Martin Heidegger’s forced tripartition of Building, Dwelling, Thinking.
My definition of intelligence is one of first, needed step, one that is set apart of sole rationality and includes ‘spirit’ and ‘error’.
The 2025 Dance, Music, and Theatre Biennale.
I’ll start with Sir Wayne McGregor, director of the Venice Dance Biennale, and my answer will be predicated on the work McGregor did last year. You know what I noticed? A young audience, a very young audience. Also, after every show, I walked out with a distinct idea, or a distinct feeling: I felt I just saw something that was a privilege, a fortune, something that joined us all, each of us who saw, who participated in that amazing 2024 Venice Dance Biennale by Wayne McGregor. Amazing, because the show could define expressions that nobody can even begin to imagine. I know that’s what Wayne McGregor is all about, I experimented it, which is why I’m sure this year’s edition will be even more intriguing, and I can’t wait to absorb all those idea as they unveil.
What I ask of the directors is to work together in a beautiful bottega, their lab should never shut down. Nothing, there, will be niche, it shouldn’t be. Their work will act as a multiplier for this privilege effect. None of the shows will be sophisticated to the point they are only accessible to elite connoisseurs. Anyone will be able to access, both physically and culturally, these shows, which promise to make history.
I am also fascinated by Music Biennale director Caterina Barbieri and Theatre Biennale director Willem Dafoe and their associates have a secret common denominator: the late Italian musician and perfomer Franco Battiato. Dafoe and I met thanks to him. Barbieri is too young to have met him in person, though there is a link made of a certain idea of music and common research.
New bits and pieces at the Venice Film Festival in a few months.
New bits and pieces are what we do, we look continuously for something new to add all the time. Rituals change in size and scope, and roles do, too. I might need to take off my president hat to… we’ll see.
Venice for you.
Venice is liberating. I fell in love with its dimension as described by Luciano Bianciardi in his novel It’s a Hard Life. I am aware of what absolute privilege is living in Venice, I live this privilege and I’m aware of it. Back home, in my native Sicily, the only sea around me is the waving wheat. Water on one side, earth on the other. It’s polarizing. Between these two poles of absolute beauty, anything that falls midway I barely consider. I don’t need it at all.
