Kafka noted in his Diaries that, in the end, we are all Chinese. The Chinese, in turn, could say that they are German Jews, and the Jews, German or not, that they are Palestinians. Chinese, Jews and Palestinians illustrate with greater or lesser success that each individual is an exotic being, an alien. A stranger. For the author of The process, The human being is a process that ends up subject to an inalienable Law, Language, that virtual sphere that makes the world incomprehensible to everyone. But our language, the one that we all carry inside, is an intimate law, a land that we must never abandon. The Law, the Language, can force us to forget the process that we are, and when this happens we see ourselves dressed in masks that exaggerate our features, suits that distort our bodies until we become lanky dolls that babble inappropriate words.
Welcome to the Venice Biennale, with its star curator, Adriano Pedrosa, current director of the São Art Museum Paulo (MASP), who has just assumed the original condition of forging the Universal Language of Art around an endless number of nostalgic appropriations and a heroic pastoral vision of the global south. The 60th edition is titled Foreigners everywhere, a proclamation that, to our disbelief and astonishment, has just shamelessly sneaked through the security detectors of the thought of the common, that philosophy that simply seeks to be able to live together without dominating us.
How did we get here? The Venice Biennale is not exactly the place to “ennoble” the global south. Or yes, but then one must be willing to face the Law, that lingua franca that everyone copies and almost no one dares to challenge. If in the middle of the last century the tentacles of the American intelligence services needed mass circulation magazines to direct taste towards the consumption of abstract expressionism, stealing the wallet from Paris, now Venice draws up its Marshall plan to make arts, crafts visible and other historical and contemporary practices of artists from the southern hemisphere. The old story has its second part in How the global south stole the idea of the market from the West.
The Pedrosa biennial is populist. His selection of 335 artists—many totally unknown in the West and not a few born at the end of the 19th century—hovers the possibility of converting all the artistic eloquence of Latin American, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Australian and Oceanic folk traditions, in a decorative Rorschach blot, what would go against its first purpose: to rescue the brilliant “originality” of these works from the entropic “international style” that symbolizes the Euro-American Law.
The exhibition inverts the position of the globe: the south is now the north to make another reading of modernity
Right at the beginning of the tour we have the first and most disturbing example of institutional condescension: the mural painting that covers the façade of the central pavilion, signed by the family collective MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), with abstractions and motifs ramibaranai that these tribes from the Amazon paint after performing their rituals with ayahuasca, a way of codifying and transmitting the legends and myths of oral tradition through representations of fish, turtles and alligators.
In the days before the official inauguration, the Huni Kuin family posed appropriately dressed in their colorful costumes and feathers as headbands, while watching television, with the public taking photos on what looked like a cheap tourist card. Already inside the central pavilion and along the Arsenale, the feeling is one of cumulative boredom. The meticulous verisimilitude of the rhythm of a poetry or a story that deserves to be well told and contextualized is missing. That's where Kafka is, because between the Law and the laws there is no conflict, but rather alienation.
Pedrosa belongs to the southern hemisphere, but his curatorial practice is conventional. For its biennial, it takes the title from a work by the artistic collective Claire Fontaine, which in turn appropriates the name of another Turin collective, Stranieri Ovunque., who in the 2000s fought against racism and xenophobia in Italy. The visitor will come across this phrase made with colored neon in dozens of languages, some of which have disappeared, in the interior and exterior spaces of the biennial. The Claire Fontaines live in Palermo and define themselves as artists ready made: “It's the same as in 1968 in France, when it was said that we are all German Jews,” they explain tendentiously. Wanting to be an artist today is equivalent to putting oneself in a strange position, similar to that of any object that is suddenly declared a work of art. The art world is populated by more or less political refugees who come from different professional areas.”
Despite the monotony and formal simplicity, some interventions make us not give up on this edition
The opening of the Venice Biennale coincided with the news that a boat adrift had reached the coast of Brazil with nine bodies of immigrants from Africa, a tragedy that makes it very difficult to understand the self-proclaimed foreignness of Pedrosa, when he himself travels the world with a high-ranking passport (according to the Henley index), a particularity that he wanted to highlight in his catalog text, where he also talks about his past as an artist, journalist, art critic , the first curator in the history of the biennial to come from the southern hemisphere and openly queer.
More ambitious than Duchamp and his ready made Fountain (1917), The Carioca commissioner now inverts the classic position of the globe, the south is now the north, since his intention is to make a different reading of modernity, of other, although in too many cases what we see is popular art and crafts (Embroiderers from Isla Negra, Chilean Arpilleristas, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, from the Argentine community of La Fontana), self-taught artists (such as the Mexican Aidée Rodríguez) and family paintings (by parents that are compared to those of their children, grandchildren and wives) from three continents.
The main exhibition presents two intersecting blocks, with a historical core and a contemporary core. The main themes point to south-north migration and decolonization, with the accumulation of meanings that the word “foreigner” has and how it spreads through the social body: queer (with his figurations and abstractions), the self-taught and popular artist, the indigenous artist, who in his own country is treated as someone strange, and also the art of women artists outsiders (There are three of them and they come from European countries: Madge Gill, Anna Zemánková and Aloïse).
The predominant formats are textiles, painting, ceramics, videos and installations. Within the monotony and formal simplicity of most of the montages, some interventions stand out that make us not give up on this edition. For example, him display as a zoetrope of Archive of Disobedience (a project by Marco Scotini started in 2005) with forty videos and films that summarize half a century of resistance tactics in different cultures around the world. Or the best coup of Pedrosa, who wanted to reproduce the glass easels that the Italian-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi created to display the works from the MASP collection, and that now in a large room hold the paintings of the Italian diaspora, with many names already canonical and an author, Ana Maria Maiolino (1942), who in this edition receives the Golden Lion for her career together with the Egyptian Nil Yalter (1938).
And an artist that we deserve to see in museums around the world: the feminist queer Italian Nedda Guidi (1923-2015), who worked clay modularly with astonishing delicacy and an iron hand, since her pieces are precise weapons against the universal patriarchal order. The demonstration that, with very little, she goes a long way. By the way, this year at the Venice Biennale there are very few Chinese.
'Foreigners Everywhere'. Venice Biennale. Until November 24.
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