Biennale Arte 2024. Foreigners Everywhere.

The 2024 Biennale Arte is enjoying great public success in Venice. The 60th International Art Exhibition, is called Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, is open to the public from Saturday, 20 April and will remain open until Sunday, 24 November, at the Giardini and Arsenale of Venice. At the entrance to the exhibition at the Giardini, you are met by images of immigrants superimposed on the sentence”Exile is hard work” as part of Nil Yalter’s work . Then we move on to a world of mid-20th-century abstractions and painted sculptures, the first of several sections of Pedrosa’s exhibition examining how artistic languages attempt a lingua franca and universality they can never truly have. The exhibition traces the journey of European modernism to the Global South and how it was adopted and adapted, with late interpretations of cubism, geometric abstraction, post-war informalism, kitsch scenes and little self-reality, adventurous but sometimes flashy. Portraiture, these works add very little.

Then you come across works that make you stop: depictions of trees and wild animals, and the interconnectedness of the natural environment and the spiritual worlds, anti-war works, lysergic images of distant peoples, wild intimate sex scenes, eroticized self-mutilation, the sexual fluidity exposed in its thousand representations, the brutal colonialism of the West, the problematic integration of foreigners in increasingly less hospitable cities, the tortuous journeys across the maps of Europe and North Africa, apocalyptic scenes of an ever closer future, colours vibrant to ward off fear and scenes from space to reflect on how small we are. The journey through the exhibition is often transcultural, transdisciplinary, transtemporal, transsexual and sometimes even posthuman.

An element that distinguishes this edition, which is traditional and with an excessive dominance of figurative and textile works of art, is the influence of politics in many exhibitions: the curator of the Israeli pavilion has decided to keep the doors closed until the ceasefire and the release of all the hostages, Russia donated its pavilion to the friendly country Bolivia and Poland dedicated its spaces to the war in Ukraine. “The expression Foreigners Everywhere, explained Adriano Pedrosa, has multiple meanings. First of all, it means that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners: they are/we are everywhere. Secondly, regardless of one’s location, deep down, one is always truly a foreigner.” Each of us is a stranger somewhere, often even when we are at home.

Nucleo Storico – Italiani Ovunque

The Third Room of the Nucleo Storico Italiani Ovunque is dedicated to the diaspora of Italian artists who have travelled and moved abroad, integrating into local cultures and building their careers in Africa, Asia, Latin America as well as in the rest of Europe and the United States; artists who often played a significant role in the development of Modernism narratives outside of Italy. The works of 40 first or second-generation Italian authors are exhibited in this room, placed in glass and concrete easel displays by Lina Bo Bardi (an Italian who moved to Brazil, winner of the special Golden Lion in memory of the 2021 Architecture Biennale).

This section is a critical and provocative tribute to the many Italian creatives who, for various reasons, have found inspiration and success far from their homeland. A heartfelt and powerful tribute to the creativity that flourishes even in the most adverse circumstances. As soon as you cross the threshold of the Third Room, you are immediately struck by a plurality of voices and styles which, although varying widely, are united by a common thread: the experience of exile and migration. The works on display reflect the tensions, hopes and nostalgia of those who had to or chose to leave Italy to seek their artistic identity elsewhere. The layout of the room is deliberately heterogeneous, almost chaotic, reflecting the fragmentation of the artists’ life experiences on display. Among the most significant works, we find those of two Sardinian artists who emigrated to Mallorca and New York. The bright canvases of Aligi Sassu, whose bold use of colour expresses an explosion of contrasting emotions, symbolise a continuous search for belonging. The intense shades and the maritime background echo the rediscovered Mediterranean landscape to which the artist had arrived after his move to Mallorca the previous year. Alongside these, Costantino Nivola’s installations explore the duality of cultural identity, using it to create an immersive dialogue between the past and the present with his sand sculpture, which effortlessly opposes the force of gravity, thus affirming the own will to live. The monumental bas-relief that dominates the space – created with the exclusive sand casting technique developed by the artist while playing with his children on the beaches of Long Island – draws inspiration from prehistoric Sardinian figurines, from the traditional masks of the island celebration and from the interpretation of New York School of Native American Totemic Cultures.

The Third Room is a celebration of the Italian diaspora and a continuous dialogue between tradition and innovation. Anna Maria Maiolino, a resident of Brazil who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, displays a quiet introspection and a deep connection with her native land. In her map of Italy burned in its entirety, she wants to evoke the unprecedented bombing perpetrated against Italy by the Allied forces in 1942 – the year of the artist’s birth – and expresses her abstract sense of alienation from her country of origin. The diaspora experience is explored on both an individual and collective level. Paolo Gasparini’s photographs (from Trieste to Venezuela) capture an armed Cuban guerrilla wearing a dirty uniform, supporting a revolution that never happened in Italy, while Luigi Domenico Gismondi (from Sanremo to Peru) chooses to portray individuals in Quechua clothing typical of Cusco, where the backdrop is decidedly non-Andean, and instead evokes a sentimental dreamscape of European gardens and Tuscan hills. The Third Room of the Historical Core is configured as an invitation to reflect on the dynamics of migration and the impact these have on cultural and artistic identity. The works on display testify to the difficulties and challenges faced by Italian artists in the diaspora and celebrate resilience and the ability to reinvent themselves.

Irish Pavilion

The Exhibition is supported by 88 National Participations in the historic Pavilions in the Giardini, the Arsenale and the historic centre of Venice. Ireland is present at the Arsenale with ROMANTIC IRELAND, a multimedia video installation with an operatic soundtrack inside an immersive sculpture built on the earth. Eimear Walshe’s project, curated by
Sara Greavu, with the Project Arts Centre, explores the complex politics of collective building through the Irish tradition of the “metal”: a group of workers, neighbours, friends and relatives who come together to build. Walshe’s work explores the relationship with the land and the concept of refuge based on collective action and community.

The videos were filmed at the sustainable expertise centre, “Common Knowledge”, based in the deep Burren on the west coast of Ireland. It features a group of seven artists led by choreographer Mufutau Yusuf. The soundtrack is an opera that describes the scene of an eviction, it is composed by Amanda Feery with a libretto by Walshe. The video enchants viewers, bringing back to life the ancient practice of raw earth constructions, the spirit of which is also reflected in the benches and seats from which the projection is watched. The three pairs of screens merge into a contemporary opera, telling a story that, with a disturbing tone, challenges the common idea of a green, serene and lush Ireland. The protagonists, dressed in ordinary clothes, hide their faces behind vinyl masks with a clear fetish appeal. The bodies meet in a dance of clashes, fights and caresses; hands and feet sink into the mud, symbolizing the hardships of work and domestic life. Amid the cold and miserable ruin, however, one can see a sense of community that has now been lost.

At the end of the Biennial, the work will be brought back to Ireland for a national tour, supported by the Arts Council, which will visit various locations on the island. By recreating elements of the installation at each location, the Irish tour will allow Irish-based audiences to experience the work of Eimear Walshe. A documentary film about the project is also being made. Eimear Walshe’s artistic research and production are deeply linked to the roots of Ireland, but in the work, we can see the vision of a nation in a growing crisis, which is a central theme of her work. The installation pays homage to those who continue to be a refuge for each other and creates a link between a poor and challenging but supportive past and an apparently easy but more individualistic, oppressive present. In the videos included in the project, a sense of lost relationships, places and connections is reclaimed and an invitation to return to history, community, language and tradition.

Italian Pavilion

The exhibition project for the Italian Pavilion, curated by Luca Cerizza, is called Due qui / To Hear and has its central nucleus in a large sound and environmental installation by the artist Massimo Bartolini that can be crossed by the public. The project was funded by the Government (800 thousand euros) and by Tods and Banca Ifis (another 400 thousand euros). The installation includes three spaces: the first presents a sculpture of a thoughtful Bodhisattva on a musical parallelepiped, the second presents an organ that spreads electronic music in a labyrinth of metal elements both vertically and horizontally in plan, while the garden hosts a sound installation, which few people focus on. Bartolini’s project is a re-proposal of already existing works, adapted to the new context, without bringing new features or innovations. Furthermore, the installation does not adapt well to the place where it was placed, creating a sense of disorientation among visitors.

The project title, Due qui/To hear, plays on the assonance between the English translation “Two here” and its pronunciation, “To hear”. The pavilion was designed to be a place of reflection and listening, where visitors can immerse themselves in a sensory experience that embraces music, nature and spirituality. Unfortunately, neither the music composed by Caterina Barbieri, Kali Malone and Gavin Bryars, performed inside the pavilion, nor the bare and surprising outdoor garden manages to offer visitors an immersive and engaging experience.

After this disappointing Italian Pavilion, one wonders whether it still makes sense to entrust the Italian Pavilion to a single artist, considering that until now no monographic project for the Italian Pavilion has managed to satisfy the enormous space of the Tese delle Vergini (1,200 square meters). The project fails to involve visitors, as the installation is too complex and requires too much concentration to be appreciated at the end of the Arsenal route. The feeling is that Bartolini’s conceptual language is not current, considering that the contemporary artists seen in the other pavilions seem more interested in creating more innovative, immediate and engaging works.