On Wednesday I entered the Giardini to visit the headquarters of the national pavilions of the Biennale and came face to face with a demonstration of art students supporting Palestine, shouting slogans older than them (“From the river to the sea! “) and throwing pamphlets into the air. A few slipped under the glass doors of Israel’s small glass pavilion and were scattered on the floor: some misplaced person could have taken them as part of the installation inside.
“Genocidal Israel,” they said in capital letters, like a brutal echo of the only other legible text, an A4 zealously taped to the window: “The artist and the curators will inaugurate the exhibition when the ceasefire and the release of the hostages are reached.” ”. Three very young reservists in uniform armed to the eyebrows guarded the pavilion and were in turn guarded by the shadow—imposing like Zumosol’s cousin—of the American, supposedly painted in colors queer this year: the unpredictable collision of leaflets, assault rifles, teenage artists and teenage soldiers, slogans, scales and architecture made up, unfortunately, a set more powerful and eloquent than any installation site-specific imaginable.
In the 2022 edition, with Ukraine recently invaded, the closed pavilion was the Russian one, without explanatory papers and with bouncers like a Moscow nightclub hanging around the doors. In 2024, the biennial has a brand new president appointed by the far-right Meloni and, with Rasputinian cunning, Russia has given its space to Bolivia, which did not have its own pavilion: thus it manages to at the same time whiten itself a little by supporting an impeccable cause, flying over the party being without being there at all, and avoiding the hassle of the locked pavilion.
In short, it is true that the very idea of pavilions and countries in healthy artistic competition became anachronistic a long time ago and that the “national-pavilion-for-Venice” became a very restricted subgenre of the art of our time, with its own invisible rules and traditions. There will be those who say that this is a sign of the sclerotization of a small world of art foreign to the world in which they live, but what happens in Israel or what happens in Russia proves that even in the reclusive Giardini the knocks of the culture resonate more or less threateningly. realpolitik global.
As for the tacit traditions of the genre, one is to point out variations on the theme of the main exhibition at the Arsenale: there Adriano Pedrosa proposes to renew the already much-battered postcolonial theory by pointing to an even more radical decentralization of art and life : look for dissidence (and the hope, which is missing) in voices and views beyond Eurocentrism, white-centrism and the simple opposition rich north-global south or colony-metropolis.
And, without sounding like patriotic self-aggrandizement, the one that has been most successful in this regard has been the thoughtful project of the Peruvian Sandra Gamarra curated by Agustín Pérez-Rubio for the Spanish pavilion. It achieves high marks and it does so because it does not use the pavilion as a neutral container for a simple exhibition (no matter how good it may be) but rather it uses the building, its history, that of the country that built it and that of the tradition itself to its advantage. Western art that Venice embodies: all ingredients of the delicate and explosive recipe that Gamarra serves.
Sandra Gamarra reveals the racist, predatory and ignorant views that were the reason for the colonial project
With sly institutional criticism and a few drops of the vitriol of Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée des Aigles, it internally mimics the calm and august atmosphere of a Western “real museum” just as it is loaded: revising the sacrosanct genres and conventions, bringing to light through a thousand small stories and voices the invisible or what is so seen that is no longer seen in still lifes, portraits, landscapes or historical paintings: the racist, predatory, ferocious, interestedly ignorant gazes, which were in the very reason for being of many from them.
With greater (Brazil) or worse (United States) fortune, other pavilions have signed up this year for Pachamama moments and the bandwagon of an indigenism that, poorly understood, can go from the frivolous to the far-fetched. In this case, Gamarra finishes with coherence and finesse a solid work and investigation that comes from afar. He has found in the miniature world of the Giardini, paradoxically, a greater and nobler horizon on which to project himself.
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