Three visibly armed Italian soldiers guard the Israel pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From time to time they are visited by a group of carabinieri, they greet each other, exchange impressions and return to their places with searching eyes. No tension, just a cloud of curious people. The decision of the Israeli artist Ruth Patir and the curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margali not to open its doors until “a cease-fire agreement and the release of hostages is reached” in the Gaza conflict it has been received here with surprise, but mostly with relief. This remains the great international event of the art world, but at the end of the day, as the curators reasoned, “art can wait, but women, children and people living in hell, cannot they can”.
In the Giardini, one of the main venues of the Art Biennale, where many of the national pavilions are located, Patir’s unexpected and brave action, which was not even informed in advance by the Government of Israel, captured the conversation of the first and still few visitors to the contest, who will start arriving in droves today. But the presence of Israel’s pavilion raised a real dust-up since in February more than 9,000 people, including artists and museum directors, signed a petition for the country to be excluded from the event claiming that “any official representation of “Israel on the international cultural stage is a support for its policies and the genocide in Gaza”. The response of the Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, was rash and without room for fissures: the request, he said, is “unacceptable and shameful” and he rejected any kind of boycott.
It is difficult to know whether the visitors would have turned their backs on Israel’s proposal, but yesterday, through the glass facade of the building, they were trying to catch a glimpse of one of Ruth Patir’s works, Keening, a video of animation starring a group of ancient fertility statues. “If they give me such a remarkable stage, I want to make it count”, explained Patir in a message on Instagram. “I am an artist and an educator. I am strongly opposed to the cultural boycott, but since I believe there are no right answers, and I can only do what I can with the space I have, I prefer to raise my voice with those whose cry I agree with , cease fire already, let the people return from their captivity. We can’t take it anymore”, he continues.
Russian artists also decided to absent themselves from the 2022 Biennale after the invasion of Ukraine. Israel’s presence would have been uncomfortable. There was even talk of the “elephant in the room” of an edition, that of the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa who, under the title Foreigners everywhere, wants to mark a turning point by giving voice to migrants, expatriates, indigenous people, refugees, queer artists, outsiders and autodidacts, so that they are the ones who talk about the world. For many, it may be the last great adventure they experience in Venice for many years. The coming to power of the far-right Giorgia Meloni has brought with it the appointment as president of the Venice Biennale of the journalist and writer Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, whose resume, as ex-leader of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party, keeps the art world in suspense.
