1.     Venice, May 2041 or The Venice Pavilion

I sit rigidly upright on the train. My legs move nervously up and down. I stare at the landscape outside the train window as it crosses the Libertà Bridge.

I am on my way to Venice for the inauguration of a massive clay sculpture rising from the lagoon. The artwork was installed in front of the German Pavilion in the Giardini and is soon destined to disappear into the salty waters. The artist, a good friend of mine, arrived for a few days and is waiting for me at the train station.

I feel nervous, curious, scared. I haven’t been here in twelve years. 

During the ride I had time to peruse the map of the event. Some countries, like the United Kingdom and France, are represented three times. Eighty-two venues are spread around the island, some even in Murano and Burano. One of them, the Hawaiian Pavilion, is hosted in what used to be my childhood house. An image of a sand installation, in what appears to be my old kitchen, reads: “Shifting Sands: A poignant portrayal of the impact of gentrification on Hawaii’s coastal communities.”

When Venice hit the lowest ever count of residents in the so-called “historic city,” there was an urgent need to put the unsold houses on the market to a new use. Who would want to move to the city? Between the high cost of living, the limited infrastructures, the overcrowding, and the discrete but ever-present threat of imminent flooding—it is no longer as desirable as it once was.
Since a new legislation prevented these houses from becoming AirBnbs, some owners found a loophole and began renting them out to art spaces and galleries, allowing them to make nearly as big of a profit.

After a long-awaited administrative decision, the city council decided to go in the same direction: a collaboration with the Biennale was underway. It was promoted as a partnership that would influence the renovation of public buildings or the redevelopment of areas of the city to create new exhibition spaces. In addition, the logistical planning of the Biennale was promised to lead to the creation of new infrastructures to support the flow of visits and improve the services offered to visitors during the event.

The news was greeted with some consternation. The headlines of the local newspaper described this cooperation in the typical tones of an unexpected catastrophe, yet the clues that things might turn out this way were all there.

To calm the rising tempers, the authorities began talking about the creation of 3,200 new job positions, from technicians, to janitors, to the infamous “art mediators.” In the space of just a few years the whole city had been overtaken by the event.

After seeing friends and colleagues leave, most inhabitants packed their bags and reluctantly moved to the Veneto countryside, for the essential facilities (hospitals, post offices, courts, university campuses, and libraries) were also moving to the hinterland.
My closest friends had been gone for years. The more persistent—and in possession of a boat—had moved to the neighboring islands, some to Chioggia and Pellestrina.

I had been living abroad for a few years when these changes occurred, although in the back of my head, I always nurtured a desire to return.

Finally, stepping off the train, I see him in the distance. “Murat! Wie geht’s?" He tenderly hugs me. We met in Berlin five years ago, at a vernissage in a small gallery in Kreuzberg and have been friends ever since. “I am so glad you are here,” he says. 

2.    Venice 2023, Laboratory of the Future

In a movie from 1978 titled Vacanze Intelligenti^[1] (Where are you going on vacation?) two Roman “fruit-sellers” are pushed by their children—brilliant students immersed in the cultural congeries that surround them—to abandon their classic seaside holiday in favor of a tour, namely “intelligent”. One of these tour stops consists of the XXXVIII Venice Biennale . Here the children’s mother, Augusta, unable to understand the language of contemporary art, falls asleep sitting on an artwork. This short movie sketch perfectly exemplifies the question—who is this art really for? And who benefits from the Biennale? 

It would be naive to claim that the Biennale is for everyone. Although it aspires to engage with all sorts of people, celebrating more and more inclusivity and common living, the Biennale’s discourse remains stuck in a utopian idealism that is not applicable to its own practices. Not only are the people it addresses largely privileged and educated, those capable of understanding its works, but this idea of common living that it routinely praises, is completely forgotten when it comes to the interaction between the event and the local people. As the journalist Lorenzo Ottone puts it “the projection of a globalised culture does, in fact, clash with that solidarity typical of small communities that can still partly be traced in a few rural areas—soon destined to disappear.”^[2]

This year’s Architecture Biennale, The Laboratory of the Future, seems different though. Not only thanks to its female Ghanaian-Scottish curator, Leslie Lokko, and to the gender, age and background diversity of the participants. Most significantly, this year’s Biennale invited its neighbours to join in. A few pavilions decided to host Venetian initiatives and collaborations: Austria is collaborating among others with Ocio (a citizen observation center working on housing and residency); Germany, as a partner programme of the Goethe-Institute and the Institute of Radical Imagination, meanwhile organized an event on the island of Giudecca. A wild mix of German-speaking and locals showed up at Biennalocene, where a staged performance questioned the conditions of cultural work in Venice. Federica (one of the performers, some of whom requested anonymity) read: “I've been here in Venice since...let’s say since 2012 and I have worked for various types of art institutions, including the Biennale and the Giardini. (break) How can I summarize the experience...? Ahhh, the great world of cultural work!! and then you find out that maybe it's not even paid!”^[3] The event went on cheerfully with music, wine and strawberry beer. The project was followed by two meetings, one in June and one in July (a few days ago), with the aim of jointly writing a Code of Ethics for Venetian cultural institutions.

Lastly a guerrilla initiative, the Unfolding pavilion #OPENGIARDINI,^[4] criticizes the inaccessibility of the Giardini, the biggest public park in the city, which is accessible only at given times and at a minimum expense of €15.00. This is when it is not completely closed off for the remaining six off-Biennale months—of course. 

Access is possible for residents by ticket only, unlike most city institutions and museums that allow free admission at least one day a month. In addition, students as well as professors of the city's University of Architecture and Arts IUAV, are only given a paltry reduction. 

The inclusion of such initiatives pointing to the exclusion of the local population is a big step forward. PARTECIPAZIONE,^[5] the above-mentioned Austrian Pavilion, curated by the Architecture collective AKT together with the architect Hermann Czech, is the best example of how this process works. The plan was to allocate the venue for the Venetian population to use as a meeting place. By building a bridge over the perimeter walls, the 350 metres pavilion would once again become a public space used for various social activities. Walls that Venetian children, including me, used to infiltrate through secret passages in the bushes or later by boat from the central canal directly into the Australian Pavilion. Back then, there were no guards.^[6] However, tellingly, AKT and Czech’s plan was not realized due to the intransigence of the monument authorities and the Biennale management, lending an ironic note to project’s title: Partecipazione/Participation.

It seems that the Biennale as an institution is not interested in the involvement of such a small community as the Venetians. Venice and its inhabitants are the mere second-hand beneficiary of this system, instead of its possible interlocutors. 

Every year Venice is filled by half a million people flowing through its small streets to visit the latest international artistic or architectural trends, all the while enjoying a little Italian holiday. As the city residents are less than 50,000,^[7] the math quickly explains the problem. This year, during the first three pre-opening days alone, i.e., by invitation, almost 13,000 guests were accredited.

Since 2015, the venues have spread through the city into deconsecrated churches, workshops, private houses, shops, and workshops. This year, the Biennale’s director Lesley Lokko brought the number of participants relative to the last edition down from 112 to 72, reducing the external national pavilions to only twelve. 

It looks like curators, architects, and artists are finally starting to get involved in the city’s concerns and come together with those who already live in its urban space, meaning—site-specific projects, projects for and in communities, cultural exchanges and collaborations that would transform the Biennale from not only being a narrative on good behaviour, but into a means of practicing this. Hopefully in the following years the Giardini and Arsenale will forge long lasting relationships across the other side of the Biennale’s wall, with the Venetian families, groups of students and old artisans that are currently not able to afford their working spaces due to the rising costs of the city spaces. 

^[1] Le Vacanze Intelligenti in: Dove Vai in Vacanza. 35MM movie, Directed by Alberto Sordi (Rizzoli Film, 1978), 1:53

^[2] A free Adaptation of: Lorenzo Ottone, Venice Biennale, Do we really have to “live together”?, 2021.

^[3] Excerpt taken from the performance held on May 19, 2023 at Corte delle Casette on the Giudecca island. https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2023/04/28/biennalocene-performance-eng/

^[4] https://unfoldingpavilion.com

^[5] https://labiennale2023.at/it/

^[6] Indeed to understand the difficult accessibility to the Biennale—even as Venetian with a network in the island—to enter the pre-opening this year I had to smuggle myself under someone else’s name. The same thrilling feeling I had when as a child with friends we entered through the bushes at the German Pavilion or by boat directly into the Australian one.

^[7] The population of Venice is monitored and on the number is on display at the Morelli pharmacy in Campo San Bortolo. The data, connected to the hospital records and is also partly accessible online at the OCIO website (https://ocio-venezia.it/report/gli-squilibri-del-turismo-veneziano), providing detailed insights into the demographic dynamics of the Venetian population.