A mistake, a betrayal of trust, at the origin of the separation between different peoples and places. It is the story of “kapewe pukeni” (bridge alligator), the myth narrated by the Indo-Brazilian collective Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (Mahku) in the mural measuring more than 700 square meters that covers the Central Pavilion facade (Giardini).
The work was created on the occasion of the 60th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, called “Stranieri Ovunque” (“Foreigners everywhere”), between April 20th and November 24th.
It is an ode to color, to the simple shapes of trees, birds, fish, lands united by a gigantic alligator.
In exchange for food, its back was used by men to pass from one land to another, but when they gave it a small animal like itself to eat, the alligator became enraged and sank.
A work of great impact in its almost naive flavor. A type of metaphor for people who find themselves having to deal with separation from their origins, with feeling “foreign”, with being outside the traditional schemes of national or gender belonging.
“Migration” and “decolonization” are two of the keywords of the exhibition curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, between the Giardini and the Venice Arsenale, the former shipyard that houses the Biennale's exhibitions.
Issues that speak to parts of the world, especially South America, for a long time outside the history written by other so-called developed countries.
It seems to develop as a single organic form, with several internal ramifications, sometimes without limited borders, the exhibition carried out by Pedrosa, who chose to articulate the theme through the works of 331 artists, largely external to the complex systems of contemporary art and present at the Biennale for the first time.
“Stranieri ovunque” takes shape like this, within two thematic centers (Historical and Contemporary) with the works spaced out in time and speaking artistic languages from lands left on the periphery for too long, non-Euro-American, with many fabrics, painting, sculpture and little digital.
Pedrosa, the first curator of the Biennale from South America, developed a path that highlights queer artists, often ostracized for their movements between different sexualities or genders, outsiders on the margins of the art world, indigenous people, treated as “foreigners in the homeland ”.
Among them, there are many examples of family connections, with works by fathers and sons: for example Fred and Brett Graham, or Santiago and Rember Yahuarcani.
“This edition of the Exhibition houses fragments of marginalized beauty, excluded, punished, canceled by dominant geothinking schemes”, highlighted in his speech the new president of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, also highlighting that Venice “is a sweet cradle of knowledge and communication between peoples , ethnicities and religions” and is the natural square “to classify new points of view”.
In the Giardini and Arsenale, visitors are greeted by the neon sign that gives the exhibition its title, a work by the Claire Fontaine collective. A room in the Central Pavilion, inside the Historic Center, is reserved for Italian artists who worked abroad, often in Latin America. (HANDLE)
