Venice Biennale the day after: how All The World’s Futures affect local future

The 56th Venice Biennale of Art closed its doors yesterday with the traditional final conference in which the attendance data was made public. The figures say: 500.875 visitors over almost 7 months, 24.065 of whom only during the opening. 8100 media accreditations, 5450 from international press.

 

Though the comparison with the previous years has always been an easy task, the 2015 edition of Venice Art Biennale was a particular one because of its earlier beginning, which in turn has made such comparison slightly trickier. There was anyway the sense that “All The World’s Future” confirmed the positive trend in terms of increasing attendance that’s marked the last editions.

 

The optimism connoting roundups at the end of giant events of international relevance such as Biennale has also to do with identifying the “improvements” the event has brought to those who hosted it. In the case of the international expo held in Milan this year for example (in fact the very reason of the earlier opening of Venice Art Biennale), the key word coming from aftermath mainstream commentators was “growth”. Needless to say, growth mostly meant impact on the GDP of the city of Milan and Italy, with flamboyant figures pointing to the great economic results. At the same time, little attention was given by the media and institutions to what kind of human and cultural impact EXPO left to the community that hosted it. We went to Venice during Biennale’s final days with this issue in mind, looking for how “All The World’s Futures” might have affected a particular future: that of the city of Venice and its art scene.

 

First of all, there is an important remark to make: because of its yearly occurrence (that includes the event dedicated to architecture) and its long duration, Venice Biennale has somehow become a routine presence for the Venetian art world. Yet the widespread comment among some artists and curators we encountered was that “All The World’s Futures” had been somehow special for the community. There was a sense that even if not talking straight to the Venetian local, the central exhibitions were especially inspiring because of the specificity of the political issues on show. A local artist who prefers to remain anonymous told us: “even though the spectacle of a specific public concern coming from a faraway country brought to your borough can seem just another face of this process of deterritorialisation we are constantly subjected to here, I found that by looking at it I was becoming more conscious of my own community’s concerns, and perhaps of how these cencerns even relate to more global pictures”.

 

Undeniably there is a generic pedagogical attention paid by the institution Biennale, and the figures also report it with pride: 31 percent of the visitors were students, almost 56.000 people participated to the educational programs, over 7000 teachers were involved. This attention also focuses on the local community by providing schools from the region with discounts and 17 percent of the total number fell under this category.

 

To get a grasp of how Biennale educational purposes, we spoke to artist Luca Trevisani who runs a workshop at IUAV, one of the design, architecture and art colleges in town. He confirmed that the importance of Biennale to local art students is not limited to the possibility of visiting the work of internationally recognised artists around the corner, nor it’s just about taking advantage of a temporarily expanded visibility. What is really important, he said, is to treat the art at Biennale as pedagogical raw material. With this approach, he asks his students to visit Biennale, pick up an artwork or art project from the exhibitions and somehow copy it by using only pre-internet tools, therefore asking the students for a different awareness of the available materials. The workshop continues with an analysis of the pragmatical aspects linked to the production of the chosen project.

 

However, asked whether the city of Venice with its Biennale could become one of the important education centers for artists worldwide, Trevisani seemed skeptical and mentioned lack of communication both between and outside the too many universities in Italy as a reason why this is not likely to happen anytime soon.

 

We also looked for an insight into local artistic practices and we met with Marco Baravalle, one of the curators of Venetian art centre S.a.L.E. Docks. Baravalle was also invited to talk at the Creative Time summit, a leading event linked to Biennale that took place last summer.

 

He told us that responding to a somewhat post-colonial twist of the symposium, he decided to position himself as a post-local art activist, a character who is both a radically political actor and the object of a new type of exoticism. That is an object that too often ends up being studied superficially and uncritically by the international artist arriving in town like a 19th century explorer.

 

And yet, the post-local art activist according to Baravalle shouldn’t refuse the system of Biennale but rather attempt to work at its edges. He mentioned S.a.L.E. Docks’ very participation to the Creative Time summit as an example; or an independent initiative called AB-STRIKE organised by S.a.L.E. Docks in collaboration with Gulf Labour, an art collective also part of Biennale’s central exhibition.

 

As far as renting out the space to host Biennale collateral events, Baravalle confirms S.a.L.E. Docks has accepted in the past only when the request was found to come with fair employment conditions for the workers, and when the collaboration (rather than the service) didn’t imply freezing the entire space for the requested 6 months, a practice that would otherwise contribute to the chronic lack of space for local artists to exhibit in their own city.

 

Trying to connect these reflections to the impact this year Biennale might have had on local political issues, we asked Baravalle about the controversial project The Mosque by Christoph Büchel, which supposedly should have started a constructive debate about the construction of a place of worship for local Muslims.

 

Perhaps the quintessential example of that superficial approach of the foreign artist mentioned above, Büchel’s project was greatly criticised by Baravalle who told us: “Büchel used a cheap strategy to activate polarisations, to create a scandal and make a lot of noise in the media just for the moment when the project was shut down. Right now, nobody remembers that intervention and unfortunately the local Islamic community is not more likely to get a mosque than they were before Biennale”.

 

Between all the diverse responses to Art Biennale 2015, the project of the arena in the central show was clearly dismissed by many. From a merely pragmatical point of view, deciding to establish a series of daily events within the space of the exhibition could have potentially touched the most those who could attend them everyday: the citizens of Venice. Though the very barrier of the exhibition space (and of course the expensive price to enter it) prevented that from happening. The feeling among locals was that this limited access was a sign of a clear disinterest by the curator in their response.

 

More on a conceptual side, the negative view on the arena also had to do with the strange use of Marx’s The Capital. As Baravalle put it: “what is the point of reading it out loud in the middle of a theatre as if the reciter was a priest, the spectator a worshipper and the text a holy book? There is a strange faith at play here”.

 

For those in town looking for more radical changes coming from “All The World’s Future”, the satisfaction was perhaps little. Venice Art Biennale remains an event and business that adds up to the city’s private nature, even to its past as one of capitalism cradles if you will. As always however, the event’s cultural or human dimension – its content – is allowed to survive parallel to the institutional politics, a sort of representation that often and unconsciously manages to reterritorialize locals and their issues to a global matter of concern.

November 23, 2015