Incidents of iMirror-iTravel at the Venice Biennale (2017)
These nine episodes tell a story that is often discursive and at times paradoxical with detours that mirror the world’s complexities…from the self to the other, towards a common space beyond defined dimensions.
(Christine Macel, Viva Arte Viva)
Approaching the Giardini della Biennale — the Biennale Gardens — on the gravel path that slices at a southeast angle from Via Garibaldi, one becomes aware of a shifting, slipping crunch, a lack of traction underfoot. Three black telephone poles, braced against each other, hold aloft the cantilevered branch of a drooping tree, and the canopy reverberates with an incessant buzz.
On the cover of Guide to the Venice Biennale (2017), serif capitals across diagonal banners in navy and cyan and white coalesce in the contained exclamation of VIVA ARTE VIVA, a loose command to live and create OUT LOUD. The resulting graphic atmosphere is one of neat effusiveness, conservative celebration, static buzz. Open Guide to its stapled centerfold and one finds the Giardini to be a contained pool of geometric black, flat against a web of interlocking veins and canals and passages rendered grey. High-contrast icons of a boat against waves, vaporetto stops, concentrated around the Giardini and Arsenale, the garden and the fort, emit a dramatized gravitational pull.
In Guide, the Giardini is cartographically detailed on the page that precedes the centerfold. Scattered small icons indicate wifi, coffee, books (souvenirs), restrooms, cafes, restaurants. Slightly larger icons indicate tickets, a briefcase (luggage check?), the entrance, the exit, and the lowercase “i” of “information.” Black shapes are international, cyan ones national, and three grey strokes mark a single wide path and two neat designations of sunken landscaping. These bounded geometries are suspended in an unaddressed expanse of white like pieces in a paused game of Tetris, unlikely to fit together neatly.
I tucked away my copy of Guide into a complementary British Pavilion tote bag, sandwiching it and other Biennale ephemera between Robert Smithson’s The Collected Writings and an iPad I’d objectified for its mirrored surface, lint blending pigments from the brochure and flyers. The grounds hadn’t yet opened to the public (I was staff) and the noise of the cicadas was dynamic, rhythmic, and captivating, permeating the bounds of the environment and individual body alike.
There is a metaphor to be made here around the swelling networks of posts and pings and tweets. Around that second biennale, the biennale of social media and attested presence. And the two do overlap, the cicadas continuing to provide a background rhythm from the canopy, unseen, as the visitors crunch the gravel beneath, looking down to flick and swipe at the glass surface of their phones as they pass between pavilions. Crickets — which I’ll incorrectly equate here to the cicada — are that pronounced thing you hear, idiomatically, in the uncomfortable tension of social quiet. The heightened, now-heard marker of an emptiness better avoided. But there is, instead, a certain alternative tangibility to this pre-10am cicada-buzz, to the insect choir dominating the site before it becomes conventionally attended by thousands of goers, by those who will pose with it and post about it.
In Greek mythology, goddess Eos asks Zeus to grant her human lover eternal life, tragically forgetting to include youth in the request. He withers with age down to the form of a cicada, caught in eternal limbo between realms, but he persists in asserting his agency with his larger-than-life voice.
The cicadas punctuate, articulate, and expand the negative space of the event, the empty in-betweens in Guide.
With that I post this start.
This post is the introduction to a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacement hashtag on Instagram to catch the next instalments as they post.
