ALFREDO JAAR
VENEZIA VENEZIA
FOREWORD Madeleine Grynsztejn Curator
In 1986 the commercial art world was centered in New York’s Soho district. I arrived there in December of that year, via the Spring Street subway station, for my semi-annual visit to Manhattan’s art galleries. Stepping off the train onto the southbound platform, I was dumbstruck by the advertising panels lining the station. Instead of the usual messy array of commercial advertising, the billboards on both north- and south-bound sides of the subway - a length of about two city blocks displayed some eighty similar-looking, poster-size images of Brazilian gold miners bowed to their work, interspersed with then-current gold price listings. I spent my allotted gallery time in the subway. The installation (called Rushes, I was to find out) permitted an indefinite number of versions depending on one’s entry point into or out of the subway, thereby calling on the spectator to construct his or her own fragmented narrative and bring the work into full being. Absorbed as I was in that task, I saw a young red-headed man squatting before one of the advertising panels, checking on its condition. When I asked him who had made the work, he introduced himself as the artist. Three years later, Alfredo Jaar and I would work on our first show together. The characteristics of his art which so moved me on that first encounter maintain to this day, even as they have evolved, appearing now in his installation for Venice. As in Rushes, so in Venezia, Venezia, there is in Jaar’s work a constant, direct involvement of the viewer, Jaar’s ongoing collaborator. For Venezia, Venezia, the work unfolds in time via the viewer’s perambulations as her path arranges the disparate, successive components into an intelligible order, in essence co-producing the piece. This interlacing of work and spectator takes the form of a kinetic, physical interaction in line with a phenomenological inflection inherited from Minimalist sculpture. Jaar’s approach is also informed by his training in architecture and film, also evident in the photographic installation that opens Venezia,Venezia, which is itself an intersection of image and architecture. Always, and also, Alfredo Jaar has made visible the inextricable links that tie the developed world to its less developed counterparts. In Rushes, Jaar converged the lives of Wall Street commuters with the lives of Brazilian miners by visually collapsing the distance between otherwise disparate groups of people who were, in the end, chasing the same
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alluring pot of gold. The spectacle of Western power is likewise the undercurrent of Venezia, Venezia, its hegemonic ideals and institutional frameworks undermined by the photograph of artist Lucio Fontana scaling the rubble of his Milan studio in the devastating aftermath of the Second World War, and by the model of the Giardini whose cultural authoritative stance is literally inundated by Jaar’s proposal. Simultaneous with rendering a collapse of a Western superstructure, Jaar’s ongoing project posits a counter-dominant position - a world picture and an attendant ideology that reclaims history and culture from the once-inviolate Western culture (of which Italy is a central player, having invented a major mode of representation, single-point perspective). A Jaar installation will always disavow a single point of view and a sovereign subject, instead asserting manifold positions. This comes as no surprise since, like Fontana, Jaar has lived his life in multiple hemispheres. Lucio Fontana was a global artist avant la lettre: an Argentineborn Italian whose work emerged from the devastation of the Second World War. Jaar, born and raised in Chile, witness to that country’s terrifying military coup, likewise possesses a unique insight into the formidable power of authority and arrogance. Biennials, of course, are concomitant with the rise of a certain restrictive understanding of nationalism that taken to extremes can lead to devastation. Venezia, Venezia is a provocation, a call to re-imagine not only Venice, but nationalism or globalization itself and the relationship between nations that are represented, or not, in the Giardini. Geography has long been a concern of Jaar’s, beginning with a focus for many years on the American North-South axis, evolving into projects focused on traumatic clashes in specific geographic venues, concomitantly honing a sharp critique of how place itself is mapped out in cartographic representation. Beginning in 1991, however something shifted in Jaar’s work: he moved conceptually - dare I say emotionally, spiritually - to a focus on a particular place’s possible rehabilitation and renewal, coinciding as well with a new, more open-ended relationship between his artwork and its public. Jaar’s pieces became offerings (to use a 2000 title of his) as much as artworks, gentler interceptions into public space (Playground, 1999; The Cloud, 2000) and invitations for viewer collaboration that claim art for a social purpose (The Sköghall Konsthall, 2000).
16__Foreword. Madeleine Grynsztejn, curator
Abiding in Jaar’s oeuvre is a structural and visual clarity of style - lucid photographs, strong clean materials, and precise architecture bespeak an unambiguous position that nevertheless eschews dogma: a detached yet committed attitude toward his subject matter. The oblique form of address, in Chile once a necessity for the survival of any form of artistic and/or political expression, has matured in Jaar’s work into an elegant form of barbed political understatement. Importantly, as crystalline as his media are, the ambiguity of his images is sustained. A critical stance of Jaar’s is to underline the inefficacy of images, their ability to never encompass the full meaning of an event. Real Pictures (1995), The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996), Lament of the Images (2002), The Sound of Silence (2006), all speak to the difficulty of accessing history by way of imagery, and by extension, to the difficulty of a comprehensive understanding of any kind, such as is posited by the Venice Biennale. Jaar has variously positioned his work at the margins of a space or literally outside of a frame; obstructed or engulfed it through material intervention, excess and inundation, in this way forcing each of us to see differently. Finally, there is the constant of water. The last work Alfredo Jaar made before leaving Chile in 1981 was literally located in the Pacific Ocean where it met the shore. He has since regularly taken water up as a visual agent. Water and reflection (also through the use of mirrors) create surfaces that are inherently in flux, and this fluidity of always shifting content is instrumental to Jaar’s work in general, creating works that are deliberately and finally unfathomable. Looking into Venezia, Venezia’s pool of water, Jaar forces the viewer into a narcissistic posture, catches and briefly holds each one of us in a meditation upon the nature of globalism, asking us to become accountable to our own position and bear witness to our and others’ reality in world of great turmoil.
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THE GIARDINI: TOPOGRAPHY OF AN EXHIBITION SPACE Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini
To pass through the gates of the Giardini at the Venice Biennale is to enter a genuinely self-contained territory which, much like an embassy, constitutes within its boundaries a single jurisdictional and administrative unit. Characterized differently at every period in their history, the idea of the Giardini took shape at the very start of the twentieth century, inspired by the international spirit of the great universal exhibitions and Italy’s newly recovered national unity. In the 1920s, the ambiguous position of the fascist government made the Giardini a symbol of universal pacification, a sort of “Geneva of the arts.”1 Then in the unsettled period following the First World War, they became something conceptually akin to a “state of exception,” in Giorgio Agamben’s sense of a dispensation “in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension.”2 The exceptional character of the Giardini and the legal limbo they exist in have allowed national pavilions to mirror global geopolitical events. Conflicts between nations have been reflected from time to time by nonattendance or boycotts among pavilion-owning countries during wartime editions of the Biennale, and by Biennale participation in specific initiatives of Italian cultural diplomacy.3 Locally, the exceptional character of the Giardini comes out in their alienness and separateness from the urban fabric of the city. Historically, the Biennale Giardini were created by the Napoleonic government with the idea of giving Venice a green area that would lend it the aura of modernity characterizing the great European capitals. There was no room in Venice for a park, so the Napoleonic government created some by demolishing a huge area of the Castello district, obliterating the history of one of the oldest, best-loved and most populous areas of the city, without regard for the daily life that had flowed for centuries around its streets, squares and canals. This was in 1797, in the very depths of the city’s economic and functional crisis, a time when it was impoverished 1__Massimo De Sabbata, Tra diplomazia e arte: le Biennali di Antonio Maraini (1928-1942), (Udine: Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2006), 28-29. 2__Giorgio Agamben, Stato d’eccezione, (Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 10. 3__ In the 1950s, for example, the task of organizing Italy’s participation in the São Paulo and Alexandria biennials was delegated to the Venice Biennale.
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and occupied by Napoleon’s troops after losing its long-standing monopoly of maritime trade. The Giardini were left untended for years, precisely because they had no role to play in the urban context. In the mid-nineteenth century, they became a place of rendezvous for the Venetian well-to-do, who became fond of passing summer’s evenings in the café that had been opened there. Venice was still a city in deep crisis, but its decaying appearance itself made it even more of a draw for intellectuals and literati. It was in the hope of benefiting from this kind of international cultural tourism that the mayor of Venice, Riccardo Selvatico, had the idea of instituting a great periodic art exhibition in the late nineteenth century. Grafting a contemporary art exhibition on to an “antique” site like Venice offered the chance to recover a dynamic modern image. To provide a location, the Giardini were closed to the public and fenced. Although they were called “public gardens,” in the early twentieth century they were still perceived as a place apart from the city. A top-down project from the start, the Giardini are a territory that is other in relation to Venice, an island emerging from the lagoon, something the cover of the 1928 official catalogue bears witness to. When the Biennale offered foreign nations the chance to have their own pavilion in the Giardini in 1907, the essential motivation was lack of space for Italian artists, who, in an Italy still barely unified, remained divided into regional schools. The proposal was thus dictated by sentiments other than the desire to open up the event to international participation, even though it was made when the idea of nation-building through culture was emerging.4 In fact, with the birth of the Biennale and the consolidation of the Lido as a fashionable resort, in the early twentieth century Venice recovered the role as a front-ranking destination for international tourists which had been undermined by the crisis of the Grand Tour. The principles laid out by Riccardo Selvatico in the first catalogue of 1895, namely to bring together “without distinction as to country…the 4__Shearer West, “National Desires and Regional Realities in the Venice Biennale, 1895-1914,” in Art History, No. 3, 1995, 404-34.
20__ Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini
best moral energies of the nation” and “the best products of the modern spirit,” remain valid as ideals, but they were quickly contradicted by the competition to obtain a national pavilion.5 A first wave of applications came in the years running up to the First World War, a time of hypertrophied nationalism that led to the symbolic production of celebratory monuments and national exhibitions. There was a second wave between the wars, although the real boom would take place after the Second World War. Part of this second phase was the restyling of pavilions that had become outdated in order to adapt them to post-war national symbolic discourses, while at the same time a large number of nations that had risen to prominence in the new international order applied to the Commune of Venice for permission to build their own pavilions.6 In the early 1930s, during the redevelopment of the Isola di Sant’Elena, the Commune allocated the Biennale a piece of land beyond the Paludo Sant’Antonio, and this was immediately “colonized.” Thus, by the end of the 1940s exhibition space was once again in short supply. The method used from the mid-1950s onward to deal with the overcrowding resulting from the increased number of national pavilions was to allocate smaller plots of land than in the past. The very high demand for permits meant that countries had to act quickly and, most importantly, have immediate financing available. To take just one example, in 1946 the Commune and the Biennale ignored countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile that were higher up the waiting list to award Israel, fresh from being declared a national state, the plot adjoining that of the United States. In the late 1970s, the chronic shortage of exhibition space led the Biennale to seek options for expansion, and the search for new sites beyond the gates of the historic Giardini site was progressively stepped up. The pressure to present an international art scene that was more diversified, younger and less in thrall to the Western canon was met by recovering 5__Introduction by Riccardo Selvatico, Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia. Catalogo illustrato, 1895. 6__ The concept of “restyling” is taken from Muntadas - On Translation: I Giardini, Spanish Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale (Barcelona, Actar, 2005). Specifically, Muntadas speaks of a “cultural face-lift,” 143.
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disused industrial areas as exhibition sites, starting with the Arsenale.7 The geography of the Giardini emerged from the interaction of international political dynamics with a shortage of space that was primarily due to the delicate lagoon ecosystem. This often resulted in existing buildings being pressed into use, the first in point of time being the Central Pavilion itself, which was built on the site of the old riding school. This practice made permit applications faster or unnecessary, as in the case of the British Pavilion, built on the old café-restaurant, and the Uruguayan Pavilion, which had once been the gardener’s storehouse. In 1988, after the construction of the provisional Australian Pavilion, the Giardini were declared off limits to further building. In 1995, however, South Korea was given permission to build its own pavilion because it had accepted the land on which the existing public toilets stood. Then in 1998, the Office for Archeological Assets placed planning controls on many national pavilions, decreeing a permanent ban on any alterations within the confines of the Giardini.8 There was a new effort to expand beyond the Giardini in 1995, when the Biennale allowed nations so requesting to have their own official pavilions in venues scattered around the city’s historic buildings. Thus began the system, now routine, of private owners, church authorities or the municipality renting out palazzi to countries requiring them. The latter have to apply to the Biennale for “official participant” status and permission to use the institutional logo. In the age of globalization, just as in the early twentieth century, more and more countries have set out to acquire a cultural identity, and often a political one too, by participating in the Venice Biennale, the ultimate international cultural showcase. Analogously, the crisis in the modern 7__The Arsenale would be used as an exhibition venue in 1980 as part of the first Architecture Biennale directed by Paolo Portoghesi, and then progressively brought into use for displays of visual arts in the 1980s. 8__Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities, Office for Archeological Assets, Landscape and the Historical, Artistic and Ethno-anthropological Heritage of Venice and the Lagoon, Ministerial Decree of September 19, 1998.
22__Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini
idea of the nation has led in the twenty-first century to a growing presence of local identities seeking a neutral venue in which to display their own cultural and, by extension, political independence and autonomy. Although a distinction is still made between official and so-called “collateral” participants, the latter being countries or communities not recognized by the Italian government, when all participants are counted the new system has expanded the map of the Biennale from 77 nations in 2009 to 89 in 2011 and 88 in 2013. Since 1995, the market in Venetian properties for rental as pavilions has become an important resource for the city. Following the model already tried out with South Korea, in fact, it has become more and more routine for a country to be given the use of a venue in return for restoring it.9 Thus, as in the early twentieth century, when many Biennale expenses were met by national participants, the whole city now benefits from the foreign presence. The most recent attempt at expansion was in the early twenty-first century, the main development as far as Europe was concerned being the gradual arrival of the new nationalities that had emerged since the fall of the Berlin Wall, while beyond Europe the Biennale was decisively and systematically opened up to non-Western art scenes. The quest for artistic transversality transcending any territorial principle in the thematic shift of the 1970s editions of the Biennale and the pressure to complete the map of the Giardini outside their own confines that had begun in the 1990s were synthesized in the two editions curated by Harald Szeemann, which, with the manifesto/titles “dAPERTutto” (1999) and “PLATEAU OF HUMANKIND” (2001), inaugurated a globalized vision of the Biennale. From then on, following the new course given to the event, the two exhibition areas and the national pavilions were united by a single exhibition discourse developed by the artistic director of the Biennale. 9__Korea is an interesting example of a new generation of national pavilions because permission was granted on condition that it paid for the replacement toilet facilities to be rebuilt in the same form and to the same dimensions as the old ones. A notable recent example is the participation of Mexico, which undertook to restore the Church of San Lorenzo at Castello, which had been at risk of demolition after lying abandoned for years, in return for a nine-year concession of the building as a Biennale exhibition venue.
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The profile of countries seeking to join the exclusive club of the Biennale has remained substantially unchanged and, as in the twentieth century, new participants include newly constituted or economically rising national entities in search of international recognition. At the institutional level, meanwhile, the Biennale is working to export the Giardini model to the Arsenale, where countries that can afford a more central situation for their exhibitions are expected to take sites; the share-out began with the allocation of a site to China in 2005 and then the opening of the Italian Pavilion in 2007. Contemporary geopolitical disparities are once again on display in the hierarchy of official national participants, divided between the “traditional” countries included in the Giardini and “new” countries housed in the Arsenale or in historical Venetian palazzi, depending on what they are prepared to invest. In the transition from nineteenth-century internationalism to the idea of a global exhibition, the remoteness of the Giardini from Venice’s urban dynamic and from the critical reflection on the idea of the nation that has been a feature of the post-colonial debate has preserved the “state of exception” of the pavilions. Extending the logic of the Giardini to the Arsenale, the latest phase in an effort to give coherence to an event whose eclecticism has been at once its weakness and its strength, does not by itself resolve the chronic crisis of the system of national pavilions. Rather, the opening of the Arsenale seems to transpose the structure of the Biennale into a model close to that of Art Basel and other contemporary art fairs based on the juxtaposition of a core curatorial program and the offerings of individual galleries crowding the rest of the available exhibition surface. The exceptional nature of the Giardini is to be sought elsewhere, in the crisis of the formula of nationally-based participation that became apparent in the 1950s, when the Biennale lost its primacy as the sole international contemporary art show.10 In 1955, Documenta was inaugurated in Kassel—an event based not on national origin but on the merits 10__The biennials of São Paulo (1951), Alexandria (1955) and Paris (1959) were also inaugurated in the 1950s. The first edition of the New Delhi triennial was held in 1948.
24__Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini
of the work exhibited, which immediately brought into relief the antiquated character of the Biennale system. The Venetian selection criterion, born at the crossroads between the academicism of the Salon and the imperatives of cultural diplomacy, crumbled in the 1960s before the new dynamics of the art market organized around the dialectic between New York, Paris and London and based on a supranational idea of contemporary art.11 If Venice’s competitive and self-referential exhibition system still worked within the confines of the Giardini, by the late 1960s the outside world wanted this most important of Italy’s public cultural institutions to modernize and reflect the international situation. The 1968 protest was mainly an attack on the contradictions of a democratic cultural institution that, sequestered behind an elite of a few nations, had shown itself incapable of producing a discourse. In the wake of this protest, the Biennale had to confront the crisis of its formula and carry out a reassessment. The system based on national entries was neither democratic nor artistically and critically meaningful, since quantity was not matched by quality. This was compounded by the lack of overall direction for the event, which centered on the offerings of the pavilions and a plethora of Italian contributions in the form of special exhibitions chosen by the Commission for Figurative Arts. How could the presence of all these countries in Venice be modernized and rendered productive? Forced to update its exhibition system and objectives, the Biennale tackled the institutional peculiarity whereby it was run by an Italian chair in dialogue with foreign participants who were completely autonomous and had equal rights, although excluded from the management board. The determination to change the “dispersive system” yielded its first results in the 1976 program. The then director of the Visual Arts and Architecture section, Vittorio Gregotti, indicated how the Biennale system might operate by working on its preparatory phase, developing general subject areas in collaboration with the participating countries. The title/topic left ample scope for discussion that informed all the activities of the Visual Arts and Architecture section, the result being that Italian and foreign participants worked to a common discourse. This method, based on contact with foreign participants, 11__This was also contributed to by the first contemporary art fairs, which appeared in Switzerland and Germany in those years.
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led to a Biennale where all the exhibits were variations on the general theme of the “environment.” Of great interest was that “not only the object but the place itself had to be drawn attention to and made available: for a work to exist as a fragment of a whole, it has to acknowledge and disrupt the context.”12 The theme of the “environment” acquired an extra value because it tied in with the Giardini, the place where the structural problem of the Biennale had arisen. The aim of the 1976 Biennale was to position itself as a horizontal international platform for the contemporary critical debate. In this way, the uniqueness of the “Biennale system,” seen for many years as an obstacle, was turned into a unique formula of production. The push for international transversality was called into question again in 1993 by the artistic director Achille Bonito Oliva, whose I Punti Cardinali dell’Arte defends a “mosaic” structure, opposed to any unifying theoretical principle but capable of presenting “the international complexity of art” without any ultimate attachment to purely national discourses. The formula proposed by Bonito Oliva meant that for the first time the principle of national representation in the pavilions could be suspended, so that the dogmatism of the passport was eased if not resolved. The decision to invite an artist of French origin, Louise Bourgeois, to exhibit in the United States Pavilion did not revolutionize the structure of the Giardini but did institutionalize the idea that what was exceptional about the Biennale were the pavilions and, by extension, the system of national representation. After more than a century of piecemeal alterations and adjustments, the symbolic discourse of the pavilions has thus survived substantially unchanged,13 as has the morphological inability of the Giardini to adapt 12__Vittorio Gregotti, Lettera n.2, “Quei rompiballe dei giornalisti”, in L’Espresso, July 18, 1976. 13__Two efforts made in the 1960s departed from this principle. In 1967, Louis Kahn was invited to rethink the Giardini. The architect suggested demolishing the Central Pavilion and building a new one with a central piazza large enough to host exhibitions and artists all year round. Kahn did not dare to alter the topography of the national pavilions in his proposal, however. The next year, Gillo Dorfles and Germano Celant provocatively suggested razing the existing buildings and erecting a single new one in their place to host all the artists without any kind of national subdivision.
26__Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini
to a transnational vision of art. The fact is that, as in any effective state of exception, even the symbolic discourse of the Giardini is based on fiction. And although it may be impracticable to put an end to the exception, it is possible, as Agamben suggests, “to try to stop the machine and display its central fiction.”14 Not correct it, but suspend its workings and demonstrate its inadequacy. Venezia,Venezia works in this way, as an attempt to “deactivate and discontinue”15 the linkage between the international fair and national representation, between life and law. In Alfredo Jaar’s installation, the intermittent presence of the Giardini is juxtaposed with a photograph of Lucio Fontana, who returned in 1946 to a war-ravaged Milan and sought out his studio amid the rubble. It was the moment in history when, after the hiatus caused by the conflict, it would become possible to turn the competitive structure of the fascist-era Biennale into a topography of openness and solidarity. And yet the promise of reconstruction and change touched only the edge of the problem, with no reconsideration of the issue from first principles and no concrete effect on the worldview defined by the pavilions. The conceptual tabula rasa offered by the apnea of the Giardini in Venezia,Venezia is what would be needed to do this today.
14__Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., p. 111. 15__Ibid., p. 112.
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OTHER PLACES
OTHER VOICES
Shock and Emergency in Venice Vicen莽 Altai贸
We are in Venice. In Chile, only not quite: a piece of Chile in what was once the city-state and Republic of Venice, where a global event central to the world of art is being held, the Biennale. Nor are we at the heart of it, for the most privileged places belong to the pavilions of front-ranking states, even though the architectural prototypes - the detached house, not the town house - are scattered and atomized along intersecting routes, each isolated in its own autonomy. As for us, it is rather the suburbs that we are in now, well away from the center. A bridging role, that is us. We are enclosed by a geopolitics of states whose culture is projected symbolically beyond their borders, on the offensive, in a particular way; each is exhibited as part of a planetary culture situated somewhere between folklore and innovation, idiosyncrasy and individuality; not necessarily universal, made up of mosaics and fragments, with no objective correlative, just as history is: power and catastrophes. Even so, the “Europe model,” entrenched and cosmic, more labyrinthine than theocratic or colonial or pyramidically republican, finds that the culture of diversity (including linguistic diversity) contains variables of differences that transcend political unity, be it that of economics or universal administration. We are, then, both inside and outside certain pure forms that ceaselessly take shape and disintegrate in the dynamics of history. We are in the entrance of the Chilean pavilion, where the invited artist is Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean by origin and upbringing who now lives in New York, an artist of the first global generation, internationally recognized for using a critique of the image to bring hidden conflicts to light. A conscientious investigator, standing between art and politics, forms and mass culture, he drew the attention of the international cultural community to the African continent with his work on the Rwanda genocide. Now once again he exclaims, in a rationalist typography: “Venezia,Venezia.” Not a trademark of the city thus named and signified by history, or of its emblematic beauty as a bridge between West and East, but something that is called out to, invoked, gainsaid in the name. Is that you, or are they multiple, these identities you displace and represent? For now we are aware of a twofold displacement, of place and of representation: where are you, and where do you come from? We are inside the art. No sooner do we enter than a large-format fullfrontal image, taken from life, shows us a person surrounded by ruins. It could be one of so many anonymous pictures taken by war reporters to show the destruction of a place, loss and annihilation. However, in the rare photographs Jaar deploys, whatever their meaning (“images have an
31
55TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION
la Biennale di Venezia 1 JUNE – 24 NOVEMBER 2013 PAVILION OF CHILE ARTIGLIERIE DELL’ARSENALE ALFREDO JAAR VENEZIA, VENEZIA CURATED BY MADELEINE GRYNSZTEJN
SUPPORTERS
National Council for Culture and the Arts Ministry of Foreign Affairs ProChile Fundación Imagen de Chile Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg & Cape Town Galerie Lelong, New York kamel mennour, Paris Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea, Rome ICUN, Impresa Costruzione Ulisse Navarra, Rome
SPECIAL THANKS
Luciano Cruz-Coke Carvallo Beatriz Bustos Magdalena Moreno Mujica Cristobal Lehyt Jorge Tacla Soledad Saieh Patricio Pozo Alfonso Diaz Claudia Villaseca Constanza Güell Antonio Arévalo Jorge Dalmazzo
THE TEAM
ARCHITECT COORDINATOR
Stefania Miscetti ARCHITECT SUPERVISOR
Luigi D’Oro ITALIAN COORDINATOR
LIGHTBOX
Grieger, Düsseldorf GIARDINI SURVEY
Matteo Ballarin, Kuno Mayr MODEL
Francesca Bertolotti
Modelab, Rome
ITALIAN COORDINATOR ASSISTANT
PROJECT MANAGER
Chiara Ianeselli US COORDINATOR
Capucine Gros COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR
Patricia C. Phillips COMMUNICATIONS GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Marco Galofaro MODELAB TEAM
Ilaria Benassi, Silvia Curtilli, Fabio Maiolin, Marcello Moroni, Ave Pichierri MOLD AND CASTING
Ramona Todoca
Antonio Luchinelli, Pietrasanta Industries
GENERAL CONSTRUCTION
PHOTOGRAPHY
ICUN, Rome PROJECT MANAGER
Arch. Giuseppe Caporaso STRUCTURAL ENGINEER
Ing. Antonio Pecoraro TECHNICAL COORDINATOR
Arch. Vittorio Mariani EXECUTIVE COORDINATOR
Arch. Riccardo Crocetti WORKSHOP MANAGER
Adriano Cepale TECHNICAL REALIZATION
Mirko Beltrano, Victor Cecala, Massimiliano Guerrisi, Luciano Lilli, Salvatore Mandaliti, Stefano Morazzini, Ivano Sodi
Agostino Osio PAVILION MANAGER
Natasa Vasiljevic PAVILION GUARD
Carlo Cecconi PAVILION GUARD
Serena Oliva ALFREDO JAAR STUDIO
Capucine Gros Jerzy Klebieko Ravi Rajan Joonyoung Suk Jonathan Terranova
PUBLICATION DETAILS
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THE WORK
Alfredo Jaar Venezia, Venezia, 2013 Lightbox with black and white transparency Photograph: Milan, 1946: Lucio Fontana visits his studio on his return from Argentina Š Archivi Farabola 244 cm x 244 cm x 18 cm Metal pool, 1:60 resin model of Giardini, hydraulic system 100 cm x 500 cm x 500 cm Wood structure, metal 100 cm x 1600 cm x 1400 cm
INDEX
Venezia, Venezia Milan, 1946: Lucio Fontana visits his studio on his return from Argentina 15__Foreword
Madeleine Grynsztejn, curator 19__The
Giardini: Topography of an Exhibition Space Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini Other Voices, Other Places
31__Shock
and Emergency in Venice Vicen莽 Altai贸
35__Random
Anecdotes Elvira Dyangani Ose
39__Silencing
and Silenced: In Search of Lost Europe Luigi Fassi
45__Allegories
of Crisis Andrea Giunta
49__The
Ghost of Venice Hou Hanru
53__Africa
in Venice: Visibility is not the Question Salah Hassan
57__Il
nuovo ordine - The New Order Mary Jane Jacob
61__Acqua
alta - High Waters Geeta Kapur
67__
“Nicky-Nacky to Bunga Bunga”: Venice Preserv’d in the Global Assembly Line of Biennales Sarat Maharaj
73__
Sinking City, Strong Spruces Antonio Negri
77__
Spectral Descents Patricia Phillips
81__
Let Venice Sink... Alone Mari Carmen Ramírez
85__
An Unsinkable Island Jacques Rancière
89__
In the Span of Some Twelve Steps, Lie Countless Stories Rasha Salti
95__
This is not Chile Adriana Valdés
99__
Afterword: To the Reader Adriana Valdés, catalogue editor
107__
About the authors
113__
Venezia, Venezia Venice, 2013: The Giardini
285__
Official letter from the Chilean Minister Official letter from Chile’s Foreign Office
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Gratitude from Alfredo Jaar
The artist wishes to express his deep gratitude to the extraordinary team of remarkable professionals that made this project possible, particularly Stefania Miscetti, Marco Galofaro, Kuno Mayr and Luigi D’Oro as well as Francesca Bertolotti and Capucine Gros whose commitment to the project has been unwavering since day one. A very special acknowledgement goes to the generous supporters whose contribution was fundamental: Lia Rumma, Mary Sabbatino, Liza Essers, Patricia Ready, Kamel Mennour, and Thomas Schulte, as well as Filippo Faruffini and Giovanni Giuliani. The authors of the catalogue deserve my utmost admiration and thankfulness for their brilliant essays and far reaching vision. I also wish to thank Madeleine Grynsztejn and Adriana ValdÊs for their extraordinary support and a friendship that started three decades ago. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Achille Bonito Oliva and Thomas Sokolowski who brought me to the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1986. That is when Venezia, Venezia was born.
Tinariwen Keith Jarrett Samuel Yirga Teresa Salgueiro Ablaye Ndiaye Thiossane Leonard Cohen Chris Hedges Kay Larson Evelyne Meynard Nicolas Jaar