I recently spent a few days on holiday in Venice, mainly walking around the Art Biennale, its satellite events, and exhibitions, while getting lost in the streets and islands with my partner and son. It was a time to reset and gather experiences regarding the world’s reality, viewed from a protected third point of view, yet also grounded deeply thanks to journalists and artists who put their lives at risk through their work.
This edition of the Venice Art Biennale, titled In Minor Keys, was brought to life following the untimely death of its artistic director, Koyo Kouoh. Sadly, she departed this world early, leaving her work somehow unfinished and the Biennale vulnerable. You can feel this while walking around the exhibitions. Although the international group of curators, jury, and artists made their best efforts to preserve her will and intentions, geopolitical madness and dominant power spheres pushed through their impositions, just as they have done around the world: invasions, genocides, targeted murders, and abductions committed with no justice or repercussions whatsoever. Art and the Venice Biennale are highly political. They were not spared from the world’s tensions and the use of force to impose the will of powerful nations. Yet artistic and human perspectives from the Global South to the Empire-Dominated North were accounted for, thanks to the many artists who made this possible and the local people of Venice, who remain so welcoming and caring despite the floods of tourists and travelers.
Speaking of the locals: kudos for how lovingly the people of Venice treat you when you are walking around with a five-month-old baby. I haven’t experienced so much love coming from strangers since I was myself a child. Being a Latin American immigrant in Europe and Switzerland for over 16 years has created a sense of humbleness and responsibility that is hard to explain. I have experienced discrimination, racisms, and prejudice on my own skin more times than I can count, and at the same time I have experienced trust, been welcomed, helped, taught, and inspired by others, more times than I can count as well.
The wheel of life and the wheel of history have their own intelligence. It doesn’t matter how much power, wealth, knowledge, or fame you possess at any given point in time. The wheel of time will find its way to humble each of us and show us that everything is transient. I try to understand the anger and rage that have flooded the internet, the lives, and the intentions of so many politicians, world and company leaders, and the people who support them. One thing becomes clear: there is nothing that justifies killing. There is nothing that justifies destruction. There is no point in fighting back with more violence. The only solution for suffering, killing, and destruction is to look inside each of us, acknowledge our mistakes and responsibilities, and start repairing the world from the inside out. Our resistance is to stay us, to stay alive, to speak up, to remember their stories. Even if we need to use metaphors to avoid censorship. As Borges coined and Laurie Anderson printed out in her mural in the Arsenale: "Censorship is the mother of metaphor." We need to remember and to believe that it is always possible to break free from dominant rhetorics and patterns. It is always possible to think for ourselves and to act otherwise.
Walking through the city of Venice, this impossible place that seems always to be a dream unfolding into matter as you walk through it, with my partner and our baby son made me realize that we are at this point both blessed and carrying an enormous responsibility. We must change the perspective with which we encounter strangers every day. Everyone holds that great power of thunder inside of us: to spark, to inspire, to create life, and to hold the net that sustains this world and the life in it together. We must do this regardless of the wave of greed and the race for power that seems to be trying to convince each of us that humanity, Earth, and collective intelligence are over. They are not.
I don’t want this article to be another rage bait, another message of hatred, or another post that engenders more suffering or anxiety. Rather, I beg whoever reads this to find their way back from that corner of anger, suffering, and loneliness, and return to a place of hope, repair, and collective action. We are all in this together. This world is smaller than ever, and life is in its most vulnerable state. Go to Venice, walk and read through the artworks, visit the satellite events, give things time to sink in. Go to a local gallery, bookstore, or library, open an old book, speak to a stranger, give the thoughts time to unfold.
This article was written by me, and grammar-checked with Euria from Infomaniak.
Originally published on LinkedIn.