The Fifth iDisplacement
The map for 2017’s “Viva Arte Viva”-themed international art Biennale is riddled, as we expect the functional guide to be, with various icons and symbols and legends and [perplexing] dotted lines. But in on-the-ground inquiries, in a physical environment, visitors most want to find the bathroom. In the corners of the Giardini, the zip of robin egg blue marks the crook of a well-trodden queue at once happened and expected, a gesture of collective, repeated purpose in the dying, drying grass. It is the domain of the needs-sensing foot before the art-seeing eye, the felt over the thought. At the blue, wayfinding chromatics greet intrabody divination with a binary offer of forking toilets: Men that way, Women that other way.
The Greek pavilion, shuttered that particular day, casts a decisive shadow out into the expanse of chalky grass, slicing a geometric arrow into the in-between-space. Running in parallel to the shadow’s edge, one of these footpaths leads narrowly past the pavilion steps to turn tightly around the corner, forming around itself, at that juncture, a gateway of a weathered monumental façade on one side and freshly-erected, plastic blue on the other. At the feathered edge of shadow and sun, stomped grass and peeking earth, the fifth iDisplacement is deployed. Its mirrors suspend whitened walls alongside dappled blacks, spliced by swerving gutters of grey.
In other lasting images of Tezcatlipoca, his missing foot was replaced not with a polished pool of black (see the second iDisplacement), but with a living, writhing serpent. Its an interchangeability that might seem incongruous, the mention irrelevant to the metaphors indulged in these glorified captions.
The phone—and by extension/reduction, the black mirror—is a spatial and temporal compass, a reflection of the present and the future with some aura of enhanced knowledge, some more complete awareness. As a substitute, the serpent is a more tentacular extension: a morphing, writhing, curling, inverting arm. It’s a directional twist.
To additionally clutter this chain of allusions with some Judaeo-Christian legends and symbolism, as well: a gendered pair → garden → a serpent → [mis]guiding → seeing → wanting → knowledge → Apple…
Black mirrors.
Serpent.
Apple Inc. Ink.
This post is part of a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see the next instalments.
