Where is the French wing? | poster

With the arrival of the warmer months, the atmosphere at the Venice Biennale becomes even more rarefied. Insiders disperse on rather bizarre holidays, and the international crowd that invades the lake every day is more interested in strolling in groups via the Calli and in a limited collection of portrait monuments than in contemporary artists and architects. Then the “traffic jam” for experts resumed in September.
In short, a little more than a month after its opening, the Biennale has become a somewhat quieter place for some considerations that go beyond the necessary synthesis of the “revision” genre (moreover it was brilliantly published by Maurizio Giuffre in this journal last May 20).

The first topic It will be interesting to delve into the different approach of Italian and international visitors to the exhibitions. The Italians go first of all to see the two sections of the exhibition by the curator (in this case Leslie Locco) and our national pavilion while the international public lands in the lake with a view of impatience above all to see their national pavilion and compare it with others. Coordinator presentation comes later. This is reflected in a certain tendency towards misunderstanding.

Paolo Baratta (former president) talks about this interesting dialectic between the national pavilions and the international exhibition in his memoirs on the Biennale, Garden and Arsenal (Marcelo 2021). The impression is that until the 1960s the main focus of the exhibition was to see the Biennale as an opportunity to compare the various national pavilions. Thus, among the various local art movements. The aim was – Baratta wrote – “to prove that Italy has now gained supremacy in the artistic field among the Western nations, and has largely neutralized French supremacy”. However, no matter how many self-sufficiency efforts were made, “most of the visitors, having crossed the threshold, when the tickets were separated, asked: Where is the French Pavilion?”. From the post-war period to the 1960s, the exhibition became an occasion for gentlemanly competition among the many avant-garde, hosted (or sometimes brutally excluded) from their respective pavilions.

impression is that the turning point – in favor of the centrality of the international exhibition – comes with the excessive politicization of art in the sixties and the parallel great vitality of Italian art, which realizes at that point that it does not need an institutionally reserved space to be present and well represented. In 1973, at the end of its five-year “contest” period, the Biennale had a new statute which included local authorities, universities and trade unions on its board of directors, while exhibitions began to acquire a particular theme. Since the 1976 edition, Celant, Bonito Oliva, Crispolti, and Szeemann have presented a concept of art intrinsically linked to political and spatial themes in the Biennale, and it is not surprising that exhibitions of architecture were included for the first time. In short, the center of attention is no longer the national pavilions but the international exhibition, with a four-year output and a diverse series of events and curators.

Wings activity of individual countries becomes more appended to the discussion and research conducted locally, with the addition of the activity of embassies, cultural attachés and consulates, and with the special exception of Americans who perhaps thanks to the character of Peggy Guggenheim are convinced that the artistic and architectural significance of the Biennale (if not Venice as a whole) is above all their works.
On May 30 of this year, just two weeks after the opening of the Architecture Biennale, Paolo Portoghesi passed away. Portoghesi’s influence on the Biennale and on the subject at hand has been enormous. In 1980 he directed and edited the first edition devoted to architecture, The Presence of the Past, establishing Venice’s role as a center of architectural research for its time. It has increased the importance of the Biennale on the world stage and has also expanded the international exhibition reach on individual pavilions, expanding the exhibition space to four hundred meters of the nave of the Corderie dell’Arsenale (about 7,000 square metres). In general, it can be said that from 1980 until several editions past, the Biennale was above all a review by the curators (in the mid-1990s the department directors in their four-year positions passed to the individual curators). After the then unstoppable process of internationalization and globalization, already ingrained in the nature of modern and contemporary art whose main field of work is clearly not linked to national identities.

suddenly, the person who restores the lost significance to the pavilions is the most trusted and reliable of the responsible curators, namely Rem Koolhaas, in 2014. In previous editions, the fidelity of the curatorial projects of the individual pavilions to the theme proposed by the curator from the International Exhibition was always considered a very unstable link. In many cases the national directors were appointed even before the general manager; In many other countries the contents and aspirations were far from those of the exhibition held in the Giardini Pavilion (in the meantime renamed from «Italy» to «Central») and in the Arsenal. Koolhaas imposes some interesting innovations. First of all, he requested that the Architecture Exhibition have the same opening period as the Art Exhibition (and no longer the short period from September to November).

He then split the curator’s gallery in two, reserving only the central stand for himself and “giving” Corderie a wide search for Italy (Monditalia). He then called on the individual curators and asked them to follow the general outline he had chosen for the national engagements more faithfully, grasping modernity 1914-2014. The result is a two-year period of unprecedented coherence, in which the historical incursions of the individual pavilions also serve to compensate for a certain reluctance of the curator to show architectural projects traditionally understood in its elements.

The Koolhaas Biennale also marks another major turning point, this time in the nature of the audience it frequents. The Fourteenth Biennale, especially if one looks at the national pavilions, seems in fact to be a good opportunity to endorse the consolidation of the curator’s new personality in the world of architecture. Where by curator we do not mean the thinker/architect/critic who presented the idea for the exhibition – as was the case for Portuguesi, Koolhaas and almost all the curators of the Architecture Biennale – but rather an independent and expanding professional figure, one who will seek to find work in the growing global constellation of Institutions and events focusing on architecture.

The exhibition organized by Leslie Loko this year, although her main occupation is a writer’s job, she certainly belongs to the genre. This was evident from the type of audience that thronged the opening days, made up of curators, critics, activists and cultural workers rather than practicing architects. People do not go to the Biennale any longer to learn about design innovations (which everyone already knows and who no longer needs this show) but to discuss themes and issues proposed by the curator and collected by the directors of the national pavilions. The themes and issues that Lokko so properly aligns with the urgency of our themes and his own geopolitical identity—environment, decolonization, diaspora, “works of art”—perhaps deserve a greater commitment—and more effusiveness—than is possible to do in an exhibition.

back For Wings and their renewed centrality in an edition so linked to geopolitics and history, it is perhaps worth noting among the related episodes a strange and now recurring trend toward a self-destructive construct, such as the visceral need to create breaches in the individual. Identities and physical boundaries to welcome a more complex and inclusive world.
In fact, many have focused on the possibility of demolishing walls, opening them up, cutting them off, closing them, and so on. The Germans took up another art biennial thread and applied themselves to the active environmental analysis of the ruins of their pavilion. The Austrians naively stirred up all Venetian counterculture by proposing (in vain) to make a breach in the boundary wall of the Giardini (as if no one had thought of it); The Israelis closed their flank tightly; The Swiss – as often happens at the Biennale – have created a small masterpiece by eliminating the boundary separating their Pavilion, built by Giacometti’s brother, from the Pavilion of Venezuela, designed by Carlo Scarpa and tormented today by both architectural decadence and the political situation. From the country of South America.
In such a postcolonial biennale (but created in a geography of physical spaces still intimately connected to the colonial era), the outsized presence of national representations from Africa is inevitably missing. However, let’s hope it’s an effective stimulus for the not-too-distant future.