The Sixth iDisplacement
Descending into the undergrowth, down towards the Biennale’s canal-side edge, the mosquitos converged. Flicking and slapping at any perception of insect trespass, dabs of blood, contorted legs, and swelling bites collected on thighs and shins and lower arms. The atmospheric buzz of cicadas was forgotten as an anxiety about inevitable epidermic trespass by more villainous insect set in.
Rumour had it that this used to be the weakest place in the Biennale’s boundaries, a spot at which one could bend some wire and skip the entrance fees. But this year, 2017, the commission erected a taller, tighter, tauter fence. On a terraced incline, beneath a snaking copper pipe, the devices were placed, angling with the contours of the shaded, mossy ground. With a squint, a few devices nearly disappear, merging with the weeds and ferns through a camouflage of dappled yellows and branching depths. Dots of reflected sky echoed the light scattering of crumbling concrete. Meanwhile, a rock, overexposed in its digital documentation, tries on the open-endedness—the associated promise and possibility—of a lit and empty screen.
There’s an inclination in device orchestration today to widen and heighten, and in doing so, deepen, the simulation (see the edge-to-edge feature of the iPhone X). To do away with the viewfinder and the button. But the tauter the illusion, the sharper the edge of actuality.
This—placing phones as objects into the negative space of an international nationhood-reinforcing spectacle, particularly along its edges; photographing an arrangement and reflections of site/sight/light just so; pairing an image with a maximised caption; choosing which words to draw out with linkblue and a hashtag—is an exercise in permutations, refractions, constellations and juxtapositions. The insect buzz lingers, deceptively nondirectional. The groundliness of the ground is elusive. However many times one reinforces and reintroduces the word, it nonetheless is gone, [i]displaced. An impenetrable fence is embedded in a feathered, landscaped edge, obscuring the margins while reinforcing the exceptional, contained. The fence to reinforce the outposts of contained and curated nationhood.
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.
