07.05.2022
A series of reports around the 59th Venice Biennial
The idea of National Pavilions was born together with the creation of the International Exhibitions, figures of the ideal of the modern European colonial civilizing project of the 19th century. One of the most famous was the one inaugurated in Paris in 1889. One hundred years had passed since the storming of the Bastille and the French Republic was preparing to celebrate the overthrow of the monarchy with a “Universal Exposition”. The venues chosen for the exhibition were the Champ de Mars and the esplanade of the Hôtel National des Invalides. In the center of the Champ de Mars, Eiffel gave shape to the immense structure of the homonymous tower that would be the symbol of the Universal Exposition. For the occasion, an international call was made for the organization of the great exposition in Pavillons: the European Nations had their own, to which were added those of the former colonies–now the new American Nations–speculatively located in front of “the great colonial city”; this was divided into four “ethnic districts”: Arab, Oceanic, African and Asian. The so-called colonial city included as a great attraction a village nègre where people brought from the European colonies were exhibited. No matter who wields power, the Universal Exposition is a marvelous machine that, from the desires of the most different people, produces homogeneous power effects.
The Venice Biennale continues the tradition of the National Pavilions by inviting nations every two years to exhibit their artistic projects, the nations of the South-South participate and this presents an opportunity to unravel a whole series of relationships between aesthetic representation and narrative fictions around artistic practices and their actors. To give space to the political as well as an aesthetic discussion we invite artists, curators, and writers to share their thoughts in a series of chronicles on the Pavillons. The international exhibition, as an institution of colonial heritage, produces the representation of the hegemonic subject, and also its phantasmatic figures, its normative fictions and its privileged reproductions, as Bentham’s panopticon is a cruel and wise cage.
Here are the chroniclers.
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09.04.2024
Ongoing
Sandra Sánchez
03.04.2024
Reports
Leandro Muniz
We invited Leandro Muniz to write about the latest exhibition by Igi Lola Ayedún, artist and founder of the HOA gallery in Brazil. In the hatching of a dream, the materialization of the fantasy that has surrounded the artist in these last 6 years of artistic research is present.
29.03.2024
Projector
Ana Pi
The Brazilian choreographer, dancer and artist Ana Pi invites us to return to rhythm as part of the narratives that allow us to destabilize the nomenclatures of the possible.
23.03.2024
Opinion
Duen Sacchi
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