My Take on the Venice Biennale of Art 2017: Art as Expression of Social Involvement and as the Rediscovery of Traditions and Folklore

I visited the Venice Biennale of Art this past July. This time, in order to enjoy the array of art exhibitions at its fullest, I rented an apartment right behind the Biennale ‘Giardini’, pleasantly secluded from the crowd of tourists, even if St. Marco square was only 15 minutes’ walk away. The area surrounding the AirB&B apartment, housed on the second floor of an old Venetian building, added to the ‘splendid isolation’. Right downstairs, besides colourful houses and labyrinthine and deserted narrow streets, there were a beautiful park, a couple of restaurants (both of them of good quality), a pizzeria and a grocery store that obviously respected the Italian-style summer siesta opening hours, and at 4:00 pm was still closed. Despite that, I managed to survive and even prepare daily breakfasts and a full meal.

My visit at the Biennale started at the Giardini, the lush area hosting the majority of national pavilions. This year, I must admit, I was in general less impressed, compared to two years ago, but I’d like to talk about three of my favourite ones: USA, Japan and Australia, in particular for the message of social involvement they transmit.

Mark Bradford, in ‘Tomorrow is another day’ made me wonder if the litter in front of the main entrance of the USA pavilion was due to the forgetfulness of the cleaning staff, and why were we entering the pavilion from the ‘servant’s door’. Once inside, it was all clear. The sculptures – made with unconventional material – are big, abstract and often become coiling excrescences, or hang from the ceiling. The first encounter in the pavilion is ‘Spoiled Foot’ , a sculpture so big that it pushes the visitors to a corner of the room. It represents the collapse of the social centre, of what were once stable institutions and now drag people to the margin. Bradford personifies here Hephaestus, the god of the forging artists, born lame and expelled from Mount Olympus. The more I walked around his works, the more I realised how the artist, in his socially explicit pieces, wished to express his feelings about the state of his homeland and the discrimination of marginalised groups.

It is commendable that Mark Bradford is also the founder of ‘Rio Terà dei Pensieri’ (RTdP), a non-profit social cooperative that gives the opportunity of finding a job and reintegrate into society to men and women within the Venice’s prison system. In a six-year collaboration project, the artist and RTdP will establish and run a resource centre/shop in Venice, where RTdP will sell its artisanal products. The former prisoners will also be able to get support, mental-health assistance and follow workshops in this centre, to help them become more employable.

Japan is represented by Takahiro Iwasaki’s ‘Turned upside Down, It’s a Forest’.

The most striking characteristic of this pavilion is the mixture of elegance and fine artistic skills – which are revealed in the ‘Reflection Model’ series – with the ensemble of random objects, as in the ‘Out of Disorder’ series. The beautiful reflection models, made of wood, represent existing Japanese temples, mirrored upside down to recreate the presence of water. They greatly contrast with the towels, sheet, clothing, etc., arranged in a disorderly manner on the floor of the exhibition hall to create, in reality, a human landscape with chemical and nuclear power plants looming at the horizon, not far from the hydillic Japanese landscape of mountains and rural areas.

Many are the themes covered in this apparently random commingling of order, beauty, ugliness and disorder: culture, history, and the destruction of Hiroshima (the city the artist comes from), as representative of the destruction of the natural environment. Iwasaki’s works serve to shed light on challenges and situations confronted by Japan and by the modern world economies.

Tracey Moffat is the first solo Aboriginal artist to represent Australia at the Biennale. Personally, I was not immediately struck by her work as I had been by the amazing riches and variety of elements and stories weaved by her fellow countrywoman Fiona Hall at the past Biennale, but I soon appreciated the atmosphere the whole exhibition was able to recreate. Moffat’s ‘My Horizon’ is a narrative that tells the story of human crossing, borders, and belonging in a dimension that transcends boundaries. The first photographic series, ‘Body Remembers’, portrays a woman (interpreted by Moffatt) visiting an old crumbling house in an isolated location. The majesty of these sepia-tinted pictures lays in the desolation of the harsh landscape, where the woman becomes the centre of a story, and in their ability to raise questions in the viewer. What is the woman doing there? Was that her house? What kind of memories did come to her mind? Shall we read in her ‘remembering’ the power of desire and passions for a forbidden love, as in Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem ‘Body, remember’?

Body, remember not just how much you were loved,

not simply those beds on which you have lain,

but also the desire for you that shone

plainly in the eyes that gazed at you,

and quavered in the voice for you, though

by some chance obstacle was finally forestalled.

Now that everything is finally in the past,

it seems as though you did yield to those desires ―

how they shone, remember, in the eyes that gazed at you,

how they quavered in the voice for you ― body, remember.

The next series of Photographs, ‘Passage’ is glossy and colourful, reminding us of Turner’s paintings and atmosphere, and takes place under the scorching sun in a port area that could be anywhere, while people come and go, seeking refuge, or fleeing something. There are a mother and a baby, a cop, a guy, and all around them, various symbols of modern life.

In the pavilion, Moffat also introduces us to a montage, ‘Vigil’, that portrays the theme of refugees adrift at sea mixed with excerpted images of old movies. Old-time, white movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Kathleen Turner and Julie Christie become the onlookers, who peep through binoculars or watch from windows the boat wreck as tragedy unfolds. The privileged and underprivileged coexist, as always. The last, short movie, ‘The White Ghosts Sailed In’ explores the themes of dispossession, violence and turmoil, and trace back to Australia’s dark past of coloniser and to the massacre of indigenous communities.

If each of the national pavilions at Giardini cover themes as seen by the represented artists, one part of the ‘Arsenale’ area embodies the ‘Viva Arte Viva’ motto of the Biennale’s curator, Christine Macel, at its best. In this section, Macel has also introduced artists who were still unknown to the general public, strongly believing in each artist’s role, voice and responsibility as something that have become now more crucial than before.

I loved her idea of creating nine trans-pavilions at the Arsenale that reflect complex but at the same times common themes: The Pavilion of Artists and Books, The Pavilion of Joys and Fears, The Pavilion of the Common, the Pavilion of the Earth, The Pavilion of Traditions, the Pavilion of the Shamans, the Dionysian Pavilion, the Pavilions of Colours, and the Pavilion of Time and Infinity. It was great to discover the numerous ways in which the artists, alive or dead, used their different languages to interpret these themes.

There were many works that surprised me, but I will talk about two ‘familiar’ ones, which also share some common ideas, and that see Sardinia well represented at the Biennale.

In the Pavilion of Common Space, dedicated to artists who work or worked on the community and collectivity, a wide corner area showcases the amazing works of Maria Lai, the Sardinian artist from Ulassai. ‘Legarsi alla Montagna’ was a collective performance realised by Lai in 1981, and it is here showed in a filmed segment. Inspired by the fairy tale of a little girl who saves her community from the collapse of a mountain by following a blue ribbon, Maria Lai involved the inhabitants of her town in the creation of a large urban installation. All the people of Ulassai tied cloth strips that connected their houses and led up to the top of the mountain. This can be seen as a metaphor of the unbreakable bond between man and nature, an important theme in Sardinia.

In her ‘Lenzuolo’, Maria Lai rediscovered the traditions and folklore of Sardinia, hidden for centuries and ‘millennia of silence, of attempts at poetry, of bread from feasts, of threads from a loom’. And the loom became the tool of creation, the Mother, the ‘Jana’ of the Sardinian folklore, the benevolent fairy who weaves myths and legends buried in the collective memory. Thus, Maria Lai, a woman born in a agro-pastoral society, was able to affirm herself as an independent artist, create, and gain a social role. ‘Lenzuolo’ is a work of art and of writing too. The threads become words and tell a story, through the use of vivid imagination and invention. Words are weaved like fabric. It is just the instruments that change.

The fairies, the janas, come back with Michele Ciacciofera, in the Pavilion of Traditions. With ‘Janas Code’, the Sardinian artist represents various objects, scattered on nine tables: natural elements, colourful ceramics, fish fossils and more. Myths persist and are transmitted through the ‘domus de janas’, the houses of the very first inhabitants of the island. The domus are funerary structures from the Neolithic times, and – by popular folklore – housed the fairies. On the walls of the exhibition area there are books made of honeycombs that evoke the legend of the ‘Sardus Pater’, thus recounting the origin of these otherworldly creatures: bees struck by a spark of divine power that were transformed into tiny fairies by a distracted God. Embroidered woollen threads and large rugs take us back to Maria Lai and the way in which she expressed her art. The space recreated by Ciacciofera guides us into a world of magic and mystery, and allows us to walk into a jana’s house.

Together with Lai’s ‘Lenzuolo’ and her infinite threads, his creations take us back to one of the ultimate scopes of art: uniting people through the rediscovery of their history and roots.

Paola Caronni

Biennale Arte 2017. The 57th International Art Exhibition, titled Viva Arte Viva, is open to the public until Sunday November 26th, at Arsenale and Giardini venues, and in several locations in Venice.