Rihla (The Journey) – was the short title of a 14th
Century (1355 CE) book written in Fez by the Islamic legal scholar Ibn Jazayy
al-Kalbi of Granada who recorded and then transcribed the dictated travelogue
of the Tangerian, Ibn Battuta. The book’s full title was A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels
of Travelling and somehow the title of Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos
of many of the city and country journeys I have been lucky to take in past
years.
This is a rihla about the Biennale in Venice, Italy.
The
last time I was at a Venice Biennale was in October 2004 for the 9th
International Architecture Exhibition (Mostra di Archittura di Venezia),
curated by Kurt W. Foster, to see in particular Ireland’s “Scary House”
exhibit; architects John Twomey and Sheila O’Donnell’s interpretation of their
work in transforming Letterfrack Industrial School in Renvyle, Connemara from
being an institution of death, terror and despair to Ireland’s (and perhaps
Europe’s?) premier institution of furniture design and craftsmanship. http://deworde.blogspot.ie/2009/05/dark-ages.html
(Blog Sunday May 31 2009)
I
was anxious to revisit the city (I am always anxious to revisit Venice
constantly amazed by the fact that it even exists!) to experience the artistic and
original Biennale (La Biennale di Venizia), which has been going since 1895. In
1922 the Biennale had its first exhibition of works by African artists and this
year (the 56th) had it has its first African-born artistic director
(curator) of the entire festival, Okwui Enwezor.
Enwezor
a Nigerian has lived in New York since 1982 but has curated international shows
all over the world. In addition however he also has a very strong track record
of activism on the human rights stage and was the co-author with Yadh Ben
Achour of Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of
Truth and Reconciliation in 2003 arising out of a symposium held in New Delhi
in 2001 which incorporated human rights lawyers, artists, curators, historians
and anthropologists.
In
its optimal manifestation Transitional Justice, complemented by human rights
and humanitarian policy and law, looks to post-conflict resolution by
incorporating non-punitive amnesty-driven “Truth” commissions in an effort to
understand the origins and thus reduce the possibilities of recurring patterns
of effect in any society devastated by conflict. In our Western consciousness
however the increasingly restrictive and punitive post-9/11 “War on Terror”
agenda has marginalised somewhat the Transitional Justice notion of “Truth” as
being informative to being suspect and it is in this context in 2015 that I was
interested to see where Enwezor’s interpretation of “Truth” in artistic
transitional terms was going to take me.
The
title chosen by Enwezor for this years Biennale was All The World’s Futures.
(see: http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/exhibition/enwezor/)
He conceived the exhibition to ‘delve into the contemporary global reality as
one of constant realignment, adjustment, recalibration, motility, shape-shifting’
but decided to represent that reality with a ‘relentlessly incomplete’ fractal,
fractious and to my mind, not so much a clarion-call but a hammer-blow to any
notion of future development of
transitional justice mechanisms.
I
found the exhibitions in the Arsenale section in particular unsettling, not so
much in their depiction of despair or dysfunction in “relentlessly incomplete” artistic
terms, but for a cynicism that bordered on lunacy.
I
live on the sea’s edge, and in my journey through the exhibition, it was if I
was on a beach-combing exercise in the main wading through the detritus of an
artistic storm. A chaotic, fuzzy and very miasmic reality presented no real
sense of a “future” apart from the reality that modern communication means that
artists increasingly depend on video-display interpretations of their work in
caverned, curtained-off spaces where all light is conceived rather than
perceived.
Edward
Lorenz explained Chaos Theory as “When the present determines the future, the
approximate present does not approximately determine the future.” Enwezor’s
approximation of the “present” is proof of this.
In
that approximation, in the Arsenale section particularly, there are some
incredibly diverse interpretations of the present juxtaposed. From the
bleakness of a Mexican partition wall to the sublime ceramics of the
Argentinian Juan Carlos Distéfano; from a Swedish series of pools with intended
sunken causeways to represent global warming (but their meaning and function
entirely abandoned for the exhibition because of health and safety concerns) to
an interpretive artist walking oh-so-solemnly diagonally across a defined space
to release a model glider only to pick it up and release it again, depending on
an occasional peripheral gust of wind to render chaos in the process and thus
his interpretation.
I
know now, where truth and art is concerned, that I am of a generation where a
solidity of structure, of transforming space, even in its most translucent application,
allows the opportunity of examining that space and interpreting its effect, its
truth, its determination. I am also however of a generation who despite understanding
the artistic interpretation of Lorenz’s explanation of the butterfly-effect of
Chaos theory also love the notion that the colour of a butterfly’s wing is not
the consequence of pigment but of structure, and that the “Truth” of that
colour is one of refraction and diffraction of light caused by that structure.
This is my concept of the future. We must continue to fight for the reality of
truth, search for its structure within and use that to undermine the increasing
latitude of approximation.
In a
restaurant called Hostaria All’Ombra (the Shadow) on the Via Garibaldi, close
to the Arsenale I wondered on its name. In English usage the umbra is the
darkest part of a shadow, where the fuzzy twilight edge is excluded from the
darkness. I asked the owner the reason for the name. Some Venetians, he
explained, call their wine Ombra, from the term “giro di ombra” (journey of
shadows) after the reality of when itinerant wine sellers in St Mark’s square
had to keep moving their bottles on display into the cooler shades of the transit
shadow cast by the Bell Tower.
My
own journey through the shadows of the 56th Biennale, where truth
has become redundant somewhat, left me with a feeling of umbrage rather than Ombra.
Ref:
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/news/22-10.html
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