Here is the Venice Biennale between war and peace
Art, war and peace in the 60th Venice Biennale, which opened on 20 April. Guiglia 's notebook
If art is made to disturb, as Salvador Dalí said, if art "is a lie that makes us recognize the truth", according to the paradox of Pablo Picasso (and his Guernica, a masterpiece painting, with black and white reveals the reality of war with its horrors), the sixtieth edition of the Biennale which opened on April 20th in Venice is not out of this world.
It is not so right from the title – “Foreigners everywhere” chosen by the Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa. If foreigners are everywhere, no one is a foreigner in his homeland, the homeland of the universe.
The exhibition is immersed in our eternal and dramatic present right from the first words of the president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco: "In times of war it is necessary and urgent that the wise men, the artists, the aristocracy of thought stem the catastrophe by meeting, talking to each other, measuring oneself in dialectics”.
But the silence of the closed Israeli pavilion is also eloquent. As if art was awaiting the ceasefire in Gaza and awaiting the release of the hostages that Hamas has been holding since October 7, the Saturday of barbarism against the Jewish State.
The sound of warning sirens and explosions "speaks", repeated by refugees who experienced the war in Ukraine, and reported by a collective, "Open Group", hosted in the Polish pavilion.
Giving voice to the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin: this too is an artistic language.
Nor can the space of "tortured Ukraine", as the Pope always evokes it, be missing from the ninety or so nations that express themselves, and where the tradition that becomes modernity is told: the embroidery of camouflage suits and uniforms to lend a hand to the soldiers at the front, and which unites the population in their homes. Freedom can also be defended with a needle and thread.
But it will be the visitor who chooses his places, themes and colors to deal with lost or rediscovered art, to reflect on man no longer in one, but in many dimensions, to rediscover a painful planet that demands everyone's attention and care for everyone: art as a suspended bridge between the individual and the community, between creativity and industriousness. The art that can give a future to memory.
In this fragile and uncertain time, art cries out bewilderment, evokes fear, instills courage in the many who do not give up on the idea that wars determine the destiny of peoples and people.
If there is a common thread – but it would be better to define it as green, white and red, given that the Biennale is an Italian cultural and international event – that unites the exhibitors and the various art forms represented, it is the desire to live in peace , that is, to live.
Not a fake peace, not the rhetoric of peace, not any peace, but the authentic, collective and increasingly heartfelt desire for a world freed from all oppression and free from all violence.
The lie of war makes us recognize the truth of peace.
)Published in L'Arena di Verona, Il Giornale di Vicenza, Bresciaoggi and Gazzetta di Mantova)
www.federicoguiglia.com
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/biennale-venezia-guerra-pace/ on Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:40:50 +0000.