Whose work is it now to make a Biennale mean something?
The 61st Venice Biennale opened under conditions where this question has stopped having an obvious answer. If aesthetics, in Kouoh’s sensory and affective register, is now relieved of the demand to educate, does it bring the promise of its and our emancipation, or does it leave us all permanently suspended in a state of uncertainty where only brute force matters? And if anything still offers itself as a common denominator inside that uncertainty, where does it lie: in faith for the best to come, in mourning of what is forever lost, in the structure of the national pavilion, or maybe in the body and what it expels?
Oh, Venice…no shit! Everyone’s been talking about it: the walls of the blue toilet cabins installed in the centre of the Austrian pavilion clearly said “no shitting,” and yet somebody allegedly transgressed the already transgressive show. The pipe system designed to deliver the piss collected from visitors relieving their bladders to irrigate the performers was hijacked by those who preferred to purge their bowels into it, turning what was supposed to be a golden shower of visitors’ awards into a shit show that ended up blocking the pipes.
Getting in was its own performance: we tried skipping the line first by showing our press passes, smiles, and a clumsy spiel about catching a plane in half an hour, but were sent back to queue an hour on the gravel while the rest of the crowd lined up on the lawn. Once the proof of work (or penance) was accepted, they let us in through the backdoor on a dice roll that came up in our favour, one of us slipping through while the others stayed in line and waved from the front as the first negotiated with a stern person at the entrance.
Inside, half the room was openly taking photos although photos were not allowed, just as shitting was not, and hence the toilets had been closed off, a cleaner muttering loudly that somebody had blocked the pipes. We retold this part to peers as if we had encountered something genuinely raw, until enough chatter online began to suggest that the blockage was part of the performance, an inside job staged exactly for this kind of word of mouth. Whatever. If it was staged, then it was a great show. Being tricked feels great, makes you feel alive.
Florentina Holzinger has done this before. In her Divine Comedy in Vienna back in 2021, she pulled the same trick: volunteers from the audience were invited to be hypnotised live on stage, though we already knew that some friends had gone through casting for that one. None of which actually breaks the spell, and the shows still feel real, and that is what makes Holzinger a great artist, an heir to the Viennese Actionists (only truly canonised by the Austrian mainstream in recent years), minus Otto Mühl’s sex crimes. In one of the sealed tanks, a performer opens her legs to the aim of a crossbow. Piss for irrigation, shit for sabotage, and the provocation is welcomed by the people once again.
The trouble is that, once you begin with shit, it starts appearing everywhere. In the Luxembourg pavilion, Aline Bouvy’s La Merde, literally The Shit, turns a piece of turd into a protagonist, pushed through a world of judgement, shame, and discipline as if excrement had been granted a human life. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the work is built around a film shown inside a soundproofed semi-circular structure of mirror-glass and steel that contains the image and throws the viewer back into it. Outside the curving wall stands E.T. The Excremential, Bouvy’s white sculptural alter ego, staring into the mirror like the rejected child of civilisation trying to recognise itself.
The pavilion does not artwash excrement into elegant discourse; it makes the Biennale’s polishing rituals smell. One approaches shit and sees oneself. The film moves from a hygiene lesson into scenes of restraint, humiliation, and a stand-up performance gone wrong, staging revulsion as the Biennale’s own emotional weather. La Merde refuses the clean social subject, the fantasy of a sealed body that does not leak, smell, or decay. The accompanying publication, an anthology of fecal matter in art from Bruegel to Manzoni to McCarthy, lets La Merde quietly insert itself into the history it catalogues. The turd becomes archivist as well as protagonist.
E.T. The Excremential sharpens the passage to Japan. Merging the artist’s body with Spielberg’s alien, the sculpture curdles childhood wonder into something needy and grotesque. The Japanese pavilion stops feeling like a separate joke and becomes the next nursery in the same digestive system: visitors are invited to change the fake poo of baby dolls, performing care as a choreography of synthetic dependency. Austria gives us piss turned into irrigation, Luxembourg shit turned into narrative, Japan shit turned into labour. Together, these works make one possible Biennale emerge from within the Biennale: a digestive system with pavilions for organs, visitors for fluids, queues for intestines, politics for blockage.
Blockage, this year, was never only hydraulic. The exhibition that could not stop staging toilets, diapers, and sewage was haunted by the infrastructures of war: borders, pipelines, checkpoints, supply chains, evacuation corridors, and the bureaucratic plumbing that decides which bodies may circulate and which must be stopped. Weapons flow; refugees queue. Data flows; water is cut. Capital flows; medicine waits at the border. A clogged pipe is infrastructure becoming visible when the body, through what it expels, reveals the superstructure’s leaks.
One would say at least we did what we could, at least we tried: paralysed the entrance to the Israeli pavilion, chanting Free Palestine in heteroglossia, stormed the Russian pavilion in pink smoke and balaclavas. For the Friday protest, when around twenty pavilions went on strike, two thousand bodies processed down Via Garibaldi towards the Arsenale, where riot police met them with batons at Campo della Tana. In the end we’re not sure that anyone actually protested the US pavilion, but at this point, one probably has to accept that the plurality of imperialisms is a concept hard to stomach; there is only a campist either-or that is left. Perhaps, because the US pavilion of this edition was elsewhere.
Reviews of the official US pavilion were unanimously negative. Helter Skelter, with Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at the Fondazione Prada, was declared the unofficial US pavilion: reappropriation and excess of the American underbelly, the most moving show in the city for some of us. The courtyard of Ca’ Corner della Regina was occupied by Prince’s Blasting Mats hanging like slabs of meat in a butcher’s shop, set across Jafa’s Big Wheel II, a monster-truck tyre wrapped in chains installed in the adjacent foyer. On the upper floors, Prince’s rephotographed Marlboro cowboys, the Sunsets series from the early 80s, alternated with the pull of Jafa’s videos, gospel and police footage, Kanye West videos, topped with the rampage ending scene from Taxi Driver. Curated by Nancy Spector around what she calls “duets,” the show withheld Prince’s 1983 Spiritual America, his rephotograph of an underage Brooke Shields, and repatriated to the US its dirty laundry and its mythology in the same room, which the official pavilion could not.
Instead, the one in Giardini provided a fascinating state expression while everyone expected it to offer a declarative neopopularist stance. Alma Allen’s sculptures of gold, wood, and stone emanated a precise, resounding sense of emptiness. They feel like AI-startup patio, Miami Art Basel, New York Financial District hotel lobby art, as if a transmutation of natural elements into ghostly forms of the haunting of the great American Dream. The shapes are nice, beauty as grandeur, hollowed out. The wall text is a mirror that says nothing. It doesn’t offer an Italian translation and skirts around the Mexican influences in Allen’s work. The pavilion feels lonely and echoey. The ex-Peggy Guggenheim intern inside tells us that she’s so hungover that if anyone asks her another political question, she’ll start crying. She’s not even American.
Within this microclimate of geopolitical nausea, some pavilions manifested as a holistic aesthetic experience, containing subconscious or constructive ideologies, dysfunction, unease, and accidental articulations, a phenomenon largely unique to the Biennale’s structure, considering the format of the national pavilion. Russia was the other obvious example. What looked like undercover security guards circled around the pavilion, eyeing up the visitors who were, in turn, eyeing up each other suspiciously. Large floral arrangements decorated the space, resembling slightly eccentric wedding decorations. Combined with the overdressed catering team on the second floor, it all felt like being back in Russia for those of us who still remember Moscow’s official receptions. One of the wall texts of The Tree is Rooted in The Sky states: “Here an encounter occurs: incongruous, conflicting elements oscillate between the poles of seriousness and sadness, motion and stasis, laughter and melancholy. We aimed to fill the space with such situations as dancing, learning, listening, sharing timid glances and breaking the glass wall.” Petr Musoev, the curator of the pavilion who has little to no public profile outside of Russia, was able to attend only because Biennale director Andrea Del Mercato personally intervened to help secure his travel documents through diplomatic channels.
One of the performances on the 8th of May made unease audible with ‘brutalist folk’, a collaboration between electronic musician Alexey Retinsky and the Toloka Ensemble. The folk group were seated in a circle, dressed up in facsimiles of traditional costumes, something they have previously refused to throughout their history of preserving and performing various regional musics. Ambient drone music underpinned various folk tunes from balalaikas, hurdy-gurdies, and kugiklis picking up the rhythms of inhale and exhale, another attempt to find the common ground in the bodily, obsessively tuning the strings until reaching a crescendo of discordant strumming.
Were these sonically unsettling manifestations of the Russian pavilion meant to communicate acknowledgement of the war, protests, and scandals? Highly unlikely, as Retinsky himself says that he is there just because somebody had to present the country in the best light, no matter how immodest that might sound, and he would rather solidarize with those ostracized, even if for a reason, rather than with cancel culture bullies. This is, probably, the position any representative of a ‘problematic’ pavilion ends up having to take. Regardless, it was an effective performance, as unnerving as accidentally looking into the backroom and finding the man with the bunny mask staring back at you from the dark.
If Russia retreated into pre-linguistic breath and folk costume, the Polish pavilion’s Liquid Tongues did the opposite by pushing language past its human edges. Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski worked with Chór w Ruchu, a choir of hearing and deaf performers, to run whale songs and cetacean communication codes through spoken English and international sign language. There, language was pushed until it became porous, amphibian, half-gesture, half-sonar. Its multispecies proposition did not simply ask how humans might speak otherwise, but what kind of listening would be required before “language” could stop behaving like a human monopoly. It also made Poland’s 2024 edition show, Repeat after Me II, return with a darker echo: there, Ukrainian civilian refugees and witnesses of the war replayed the sounds of weapons through their own mouths, turning karaoke into a rehearsal of invasion. In two editions, Poland had moved from the acoustics of war to the acoustics of whales while Russia was still tuning folk into plausible deniability.
The green laser was meant as an anti-war statement. A vertical green column rising from somewhere behind the rooftops and terminating in a soft chlorophyll bruise against the cloud cover. Which war, one wanted to ask, given that there could be various answers for the 2026 edition of the 61st Biennale. Chris Levine’s military-grade 432Hz megabeam, repurposed from a weapon that can cut through steel, oscillated peace at the frequency of the universe. Green, the favourite colour of the Prophet, hovering over the lagoon, contaminating the night with its technofuturism. “With faith over fear, looking towards light, we live in hope knowing it all ends well,” as carefully narrated.
But there were other, more meaningful manifestations of art as faith. We had come across the lagoon on a vaporetto under a biblical rain, but the moment we crossed the threshold of the garden the skies cleared, and the catharsis was upon us. The Ear is The Eye of The Soul, the pavilion of the Holy See, curated by Ben Vickers and Hans Ulrich Obrist in collaboration with the Soundwalk Collective, was masterfully executed. Set inside the Giardino Mistico of the Discalced Carmelite Order, the work did not occupy a neutral exhibition space so much as enter a living enclosure of retreat, prayer, breath and listening. Dedicated to Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess, poet, healer, composer, and one of the most luminous minds of the medieval mystical imagination, it quietly shifted the pavilion away from patriarchal doctrine and toward another genealogy of knowledge, one in which theology, music, cosmology and medicine were not separate disciplines but continuous ways of perceiving creation. Even acknowledging that it’s hard to go wrong when asking some of the best musicians alive today to create the most divine ambient music they possibly can, any sort of cynicism disappears once you put on those headphones in the heavenly gardens of the monastery. It was also one of the few moments where Kouoh’s minor-key proposition did not feel like a curatorial wish but an actual condition of reception: the work slowed the body down until attention itself became the medium. The range mattered: Patti Smith entered like a Marian whisper in the chapel; Meredith Monk’s voice carried the old intelligence of the scream, somewhere between wound, prayer and pre-language; FKA twigs brought a fractured, contemporary devotional register; Brian Eno, inevitably, made atmosphere behave like thought. What emerged was sonic architecture, a garden briefly made otherworldly by listening. For audiophiles, it’s almost worth visiting Venice just for the shockingly seamless mixing between the artists, determined by your own position in the garden.
Cameroon carried this minor-key intensity elsewhere: from mystical listening into mourning, debt and ancestral presence. NZƎNDA, the Cameroon Pavilion, was also incredibly moving, able to dissolve any reflexive analytical distancing. Art was decentered and reclaimed as a channel, a tribute and ritual in order to call up all that is invisible; above all to honor Koyo Kouoh. If the Holy See made listening feel cosmological, Cameroon made it communal and haunted: less a pavilion than a temporary gathering condition for the living, the dead, and those left to keep the work alive. Among the artists was Jail Time Records, a record label and wider artistic project founded by Dione Roach and Steve Happi inside the Central Prison of Douala, a raw manifestation of music as survival and hope, while also creating an immeasurable, real, social impact through rehabilitation. In the three-channel video installation Naya, Roach and Happi scale down the intensity of their music video releases, with dream-like and deeply personal scenes from both inside the prison and imagined environments. Beya Gille Gacha spoke to us about how this pavilion would not have happened if not for karmic duty, tenaciously put together amongst infrastructural nightmares. Even if it was a Cameroonian’s name plastered on every corner of Venice, they experienced a lack of support from their own country and very little funding, as well as accommodation issues, no PR team, a last minute change of venue, and a crucial piece of projection equipment left unordered, which even we were tasked with asking around for a few days before the opening.
It’s the reality of faulty plumbing. While the major players bicker about whether to pull out of the running of the golden lion, developing countries scrape together what they can just to have their say. This is the world the Biennale assembles, and it is the only world the Biennale has.
The Spanish Pavilion strived to be a monad containing the model of the world within itself: fifty thousand postcards, compiled by Oriol Vilanova over twenty years, Sunday after Sunday, through flea markets and second-hand shops, covered every wall of the newly renovated pavilion floor to ceiling, landscapes bleeding into flowers, flowers into churches, churches into fossils, their chromatic registers producing long, slow gradients that turned the whole space into a single optical barcode surface. The postcard is a technology of possession, a way of making the world collectable, classifiable, sendable, and already half-lost. Vilanova can recognise any postcard in his collection on sight; Guerra told us that a student once tried to slip in an extra one, only to be told, “this is not mine.” Carles Guerra converted that obsessive practice into a portal to worlds that no longer exist, hence post in postcard, in the temporal sense. Their conversations took the form of Los Restos (The Remains), an artwork made from these documents of disappearance that turns the postcard into evidence rather than souvenir: evidence of the history of the Biennale and its fascist foundations, of colonialism and the history of the curatorial, and of “the madness of images themselves,” images of worlds nobody had really been willing to send anywhere.
If Spain turned looking into an archival problem (who collects the image, who recognises it, who owns the ruins of its circulation), Denmark pushed the question of the gaze into a more intimate and synthetic register: who is looking, who is being looked at, and what kind of body is produced by the act of being watched. In a particular manner, there were a number of pavilions that delved into the work of being critical before essentialist paradigms of meaning production and/or consumption. The Danish pavilion shows Things to Come, a technical masterpiece of wrapped video installation by Maja Malou Lyse and DIS collective that was designed by Common Accounts, and Stars in my Pocket, an installation of cryogenic devices used in sperm banks. The pavilion splits its reproductive theatre across two screen systems: a large, multi-screen video environment, where porn performers appear as fertility-centre staff, and a row of yellow sperm-transport boxes embedded with small screens showing “sperm races,” an online fertility subculture that turns sperm into competition, content and spectacle. On the large screens, they look down, upon and right through us to activate our energy like Powerpuff Girls for the sexually aware. As Chus Martínez, the curator, suggested in our interview, these bodies have been demonised from both sides: by the repressive right as signs of moral disorder, and by parts of the liberal left as bodies already explained by exploitation or the male gaze. What the pavilion staged was a traffic of gazes (pornographic, clinical, consumer, reproductive, aspirational) in which nobody simply looks and nobody is simply looked at. Subjects with pornographic bodies know much more about us than we know about them. They are masterful directors of the gaze and they have come to levels of realization about the body (considering how they modify it) that are vastly beyond our comprehension of experience. On the other side, the cryogenic room made the consumer gaze reproductive. Desire was no longer only looking at bodies; it was selecting the conditions under which a future body might appear. Danish sperm entered less as biology than as export fantasy: tall, blond, clean, Nordic, optimised. Colonisation, here, had become a preference menu. Masculinity, meanwhile, was miniaturised into sperm quality: motility, count, viability, patriarchy as a microcellular performance review. The pavilion excels as a game of implications that connote to body politics, cognitive sciences and thermodynamics of information theory. It is a radiant powerplay of epistemology that focuses on scientific knowledge as the gravel for future ontogenesis. Here, the future human appears as screen, catalogue, preference, profiled before birth. Going back to Japan, this makes Arakawa-Nash’s babies the afterlife of reproductive choice rather than a separate joke. Grass Babies, Moon Babies asks who carries the child, who changes the diaper, and who lives with the historical debt already attached to its arrival. The same problem of external projection returns through language: who is named from outside, who inherits someone else’s fantasy, and who refuses to become legible in the terms prepared for them?
Curator Małgorzata Ludwisiak leaned on A Place in the Sun by Genti Korini to outline the power of exoticization projected upon Albanian people in literary tradition. They took a decisive leap into the abyss of the unknown and the unfathomable, but also into the possibility of hijacking the external narratives instead of struggling for originality as legacy post-colonial tools do. In the three-channel video installation we see the unfolding of a conversation in Zaum, an avant-garde conceptual language that strives to resurface unconscious layers of speech. Language as material was also used by Ásta Fanney, a consistent dimension in her indisciplinary work, and the curators Margrét Áskelsdóttir and Unnar Örn in Pocket Universe at Docks Cantieri Cucchini. This choice of space for the Iceland pavilion, a shipyard between Arsenale and Giardini, along with the placement of the artworks creates a hide and seek game that inevitably activates the visitor’s imagination. Fanney’s art calls for losing yourself in the experience, for getting rid of western language barriers and to resist definitive interpretations. Can we question the capacities of western language and step into a realm external to the comfort of scholasticism? Can we envision ways of communion other than the international legislative bodies whose other face is the war machine?
Türkiye could enter here only briefly, as another pressure point in this problem of language and gaze. Nilbar Güreş’s A Kiss on the Eyes carries the Turkish phrase “gözlerinden öperim”: affection routed through vision, a kiss that keeps its distance. In the East/West ambiguity Türkiye is so often made to occupy, the phrase becomes a useful little trap, folding tenderness and condescension, intimacy and hierarchy, looking and looking down into a single idiom. The question widens from there. The Biennale kept returning to works that refused the upright confidence of Western display, works entered, heard, carried, searched for, circled, or met close to the ground. It recalls the old wound of Magiciens de la Terre, especially Jean Fisher’s reading of Richard Long beside the Yuendumu ground painting, where the vertical authority of Western display was confronted by a ceremonial, earth-based cosmology it could barely host without subordinating. Once language and display begin to lose their authority, land, water, wind and sound stop appearing as themes and start behaving like alternative grammars.
The power of governments to protect land and peoples against the forces of capital and military technologies is a burning matter. Josefina Barcia, curator of Monitor Yin Yang by Matías Duville, reterritorialized Patagonia under the current accumulation of power. A power one can see through surveillance culture. Their intention turns the viewer into a rambler that “walks into a painting” made of salt and charcoal. The piece is augmented by a sound installation, designed by Alvise Vidolin and Centro di Sonologia Computazionale, that receives air data from locations across Venice to produce a live soundscape based on a composition by Matías and his brother Pablo. Though, the focus on resolution studies and technological advancements as new media towards articulating and practicing the intangible were also on the table for more pavilions. Jenna Sutela and Stefanie Hessler conducted art upon meteorological data in Alvar Aalto’s pavilion of Finland. Aeolian Suite consists of sound-emitting kinetic hair sculptures, each representing one of the five Venetian winds. In this context of environmental awareness as an axis for art, Ocean Space, the local collaborative platform of TBA21, advocates for Listening for the Rights of Nature. Nature Speaks, their open research unit turned into a policy lab where a number of initiatives meet, and Tide of Returns, a show of artistic research by Repatriates Collective that engages towards a relationship with water bodies against the brutality of our extractivisms, are on display in Chiesa di San Lorenzo. This is where we met with Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa and Benedetta d’Ettorre, director and project manager lead of TBA21-Academy respectively. They gave us insightful answers about their work around protecting non-verbal entities of ecological importance and managing in legislative apparati to give the Venetian lagoon legal personhood under Italian and European law realizing an impact as activists and artists. What they walked us through is, in effect, experimental legislative design: art conscripted to rehearse a juridical instrument that does not yet exist, exhibiting a level of belief in law that is rare to find within the art world in the current state of affairs.
Many others turned to the earth, water, wind and sound as a way to overcome the walls of the pavilion, the hard lines of the map. RedSkyFalls by Alexandre Estrela, the Portuguese pavilion curated by Ana Baliza and Ricardo Nicolau, used art as a third term in the distinction between geological event and image-event, between science and mystery. Reminiscent of Mac OS wallpapers, a mountainous landscape acts as a backdrop, with aquatic plants and aluminium plates scattered around the room. It’s serene until a seismic event is detected, from anywhere in the world, setting off the ecosystem of intuitive sentinels etched onto the metal. A deep rumbling erupts through the Greenspeaker, primordial sonic intrusion.
In the text accompanying the Portuguese pavilion, they historically anchor their network of artworks to the epistemic rupture caused by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which empowered science over religion in Western thought: redistributing the divine and administrative responsibility of the king into a questionnaire, an object of inquiry.
Their manifesto states: “We declare—with a crack, a rattle, and a resonant BRRRRMMMM—that the foundations of thought must tremble, and with thought, everything else. We proclaim that the ground beneath what’s known has never been stable. Stability is the creed of the immobile, and such faith we reject. We don’t believe in much anyhow—being, as we are, scarcely credible, that is, somehow incredible.”
Our data and our analysis doesn’t listen closely enough; it doesn’t respond to our prayers.
OUTRO
Rather than transcending or impacting world politics, the Biennale’s value lies in its exposure of the infrastructures through which art and politics interplay: a unique, concentrated structure where the multipolar art world is staged. This year’s institutional insistence on political neutrality allowed clean narrative scaffoldings (such as neoliberal moral platitudes) to inevitably collapse under the weight of dysfunction and plurality.
National mythmaking, structural exposure, cultural comparativism, epistemologically scrambled discourse, letters, resignations, and the endless shifting of responsibility (including onto the very constitution of the Biennale, as an unimpeachable authority), boycotting to various degrees and to various ends, and insecurities around moral ends of artworks all rose to an inextricable noise.
Threads can be pulled out and examined in various ways: talking to curators about the respective commissioning bodies, gleaning communicative intentions from wall texts, and eavesdropping in the line on the old women who have middle-tier museums in their family name for a glimpse into Roman-Venetian arts politics gossip about Buttafuoco.
But while audiences can access the central curatorial vision, for this edition Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, along with the pavilions and their press, we can only truly speculate about how each artwork actually came to be. That reality unfolds through opaquely motivated events that are neither public nor archived. We must acknowledge our inability to access this inconclusive middle scale of the Biennale’s production, which, for the most part, never becomes part of art history.
What can be said about the 61st Biennale di Venezia is that it may render a historical turn of the curatorial, dismantling the assumption that the starting point of art’s affective function is the curatorial and the artwork. Unintelligible discourse reemphasises that the affect is situated in the subjectivity of the spectator, which consequently means that the starting point of the aesthetic shift that art is supposed to evoke springs from each spectator’s subjectivity and history.
Cybernetics makes the death of curatorial intention unavoidable. Once we account for the contingencies that emerge as the topos of the collective shifts, produced by the sum of subjects confronted by the work, intention loses its authority to define what happens.
This relationship is incalculable, and it is political in the sense that it turns towards the tools of contemporary politics, of the knowledge and analysis of how they may play out. In a landscape of language crises, when we question the agency in consciousness, what the curatorial can do is to destabilize the notion of authorship and narrative. We can say that Koyo succeeded in absence and freed us from didacticism, even if it is partially unintentional and symptomatic of a broader shift.
After all, it is in her own words that “…the Biennale intends neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an inattention or escape from compounding and continuous intersecting crises. Rather, it proposed a radical reconnection with art’s natural habitat and role in society: that is the emotional, the visual, the sensory, the affective, the subjective,” and that “the intended effect scrambles cohesion and dissonance in the manner of a free-jazz ensemble…”.
And if the abandonment of the score is not a loss but a condition of possibility, perhaps affected subjectivity can allow for a new ability to formulate questions. This brings the political of radical democracy, the novel collective formation calling for visibility that is yet to be defined, to the forefront in the yards of the arts and academics information complex. We must amplify the voices of the silenced in the media. Yet, we must also amplify the transfer of knowledge to the marginalized so as to suggest scale economies for resistance.
Our team met and discussed with numerous curators, artists, workers and visitors, and they were pushing for more. We met with courage that did not stop before the fabricated confrontations of the conservative, antagonistic machine of mass media discourse. We met people who do not forget what it means to freefall into practice, to stomach novel knowledge, to breathe under the gaze of the establishment. Researchers of all paths, legislative riders, silicon intelligence managers, artistic thinkers, wild philosophers, pissing ravers, archive protectors, joined this meeting to say there is more to be discovered, there is more to be invented, and no scam can deter us. The courage to walk into art, alive and for a lifetime, proves to make you who you are after yourself, and that is undefeatable in spirit.
Venice Biennale is a situation where we can learn together in a time when this is quite rare. An unsafe space where one can ask a question and get an answer that might challenge their worldview foundations. A social condition in which the political, not yet buried by politics, can crack open into the contingencies of unprecedented futures.
The question is, whether the death of didacticism is a cyclical return of the death-of-the-author gesture of the 1960s, plausibly to be followed by another triumphant return of the curator? Or is it here to stay as now the technological conditions for that gesture have only now arrived, and what appears as a recurring announcement is in fact a hypothesis that finally lived long enough to obtain its infrastructure? Was the function of curatorial intention always shaped by the linguistic, media and technological conditions of the era?
Does intention disappear in the conditions of our age, or could Kouoh’s gesture be read as a recalibration of intention’s didactical limits under those conditions? Is this even emancipatory in any substantial sense? Perhaps it is too early to say. What if the political work can no longer be curated? Does this mean a transferral of responsibility across the nodes of cybernetic culture? This might take longer than one Biennale to know. And if the responsibility to be political has migrated to the viewer, what is happening to aesthetics under these conditions?
Is this a loss, or the beginning of a freedom aesthetics has not had access to in some time, a freedom from the obligation to mean on someone else’s behalf, from the demand to instruct, from the suspicion that every aesthetic decision is a masterplanned position before it has been permitted to be an aesthetic decision? We cannot yet say. We can say that the question this Biennale put to us, by stepping back from putting any other, is the question of aesthetics.