Pope Francis at Biennale Dedicated to Global South

For the first time in history, the Pope is personally attending the Venice Art Biennale. It fell to Francis: a pontiff who was never a professional intellectual like the academic Joseph Ratzinger, nor a lover of poetry and theater like Karol Wojtyla, nor a great connoisseur of the arts like Giovanbattista Montini, to whom we owe the wing devoted to the contemporary art of the Vatican museums. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio is Peter’s successor, “coming from very far away.” He is Argentinian, the son of migrants from Italy: his relatives only by chance did not die in the shipwreck of the Princess Mafalda, tickets for which had already been purchased. In the end, this trip had to be abandoned, otherwise we would have had a different Pope. And this year, the chief curator of the Exhibition, appointed by President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, is also a Latin American: Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa. Then the theme of the Venice Art Biennale (founded in 1895 thanks to the “Piedmontese” of the newly united Italy), dictated by the work of Claire Fontaine’s art group, has a very clear message this year: Foreigners everywhere. A title that leaves no doubt, putting the Biennale on the side of refugees, migrants, indigenous people.

Another reason for the visit: a European on the edge of the Global South, José Tolentino Mendonça, the Portuguese poet who became cardinal and, so to speak, minister of culture at the Vatican (succeeding Gianfranco Ravasi), designed the Holy See pavilion entirely on a peculiar principle. Because it’s a pavilion inside the women’s prison in Giudecca. A place of pain and redemption, a place forbidden to cell phones, Instagram, live streaming… The name is beautiful: With My Own Eyes. Its oversight has been entrusted to Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine. Art in America identified it as “the most exclusive and elusive exhibition” of this biennale, given that it requires pre-registration for access and that entry procedures are inevitably very strict.

Visitors of the exhibition are accompanied by prison guards and three female inmates who introduce the works of Maurizio Cattelan, Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, Claire Fontaine, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, Marco Perego & Zoe Saldana, Claire Tabouret. A beautiful blue neon sign, designed by Claire Fontaine, stands out in the prisoner women’s exercise yard: “We are with you in the night.” This is a quote from a slogan that was common in the seventies when members of the Red Brigades in prisons shocked the world of Italian penitentiaries. The night of imprisonment does not belong only to the women imprisoned in Giudecca: this night belongs to us, human beings, immersed in an Earth without peace or light. Dense and sad from resentment. Father Antonio Spadaro, former director of Catholic Civilization, wrote an entire page of Fatto Quotidiano dedicated to the pavilion: “Francis will meet with the prisoners because they are the ones who will lead the visitors to the pavilion. The artistic proposal takes Francis’s words literally when he asks us to open our eyes to the society’s last and “rejected.” The eyes of care require “enhanced” vision – and not virtual – not from artificial devices, but from attention and the heart. In fact, already being Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio said that “the greatest exclusion is not even to see the excluded.” For example, someone who sleeps in the street is “seen not as a human being but as part of the dirt and dereliction of the urban landscape, the garbage.” The human city, on the other hand, “grows through a gaze that ‘sees’ the other.” For Francis, the artist sees that “with his eyes he looks and at the same time dreams, he sees deeper, he prophesies, he announces a different way of seeing and understanding things.”

But the history of the Holy See is not an isolated episode. All the artists in the Biennale speak of the Earth from the Global South. They overturn the paradigm of established geopolitical power and force the gaze to a different perspective. Take the Australian Pavilion in the Gardens: it’s a memorial project that should have a stable destiny. Artist Ardile Moore, Aboriginal by birth, in white chalk on a board that took up the entire space, drew a huge family tree containing the names of his ancestors. The huge drawing is meant to go back to ancestors who lived 65,000 years ago and eventually encompass all humans. Beneath the black and white signs is a forensic collection documenting the deaths of hundreds of Indigenous Australians during their incarceration in Australian prisons. They also include the artist’s cousin. His own family and the extermination of the natives, a story that becomes art and vision. Here the crossings-outs (taking nothing away from the rational crossing-outs of the great Emilio Isgro) are symbolic: the stroke of a pen is equivalent to a crossing-out.

The German pavilion reminds Italians of the Casale Monferrato tragedy, where there were many cases of asbestos-related tumors. Opera and theater director Ersan Mondtag recalls here the events of his grandfather, who immigrated from Turkey, became a worker in Germany at an asbestos-cement slate factory, and died of asbestos exposure. Mondtag recreates a house in seventies Berlin, where artists (actors who are almost living mannequins) interpret the life of a family making daily gestures in a space covered by a blanket of gray dust. It is the dusty light of death that envelops furnishings and household items. People become “strangers everywhere” on a sick and inhospitable Earth.

The United States Pavilion is lively and colorful, but is entirely dedicated to the history seen by Native people. Artist Jeffrey Gibson draws on American, Native, and queer history, referencing popular subcultures, literature, and global artistic traditions. A member of the Band of Choctaw Indians of Mississippi, descended from the Cherokee tribe, Gibson again suggests, and not only in a metaphorical sense, the totems of his world. Here, the intertribal aesthetics, beading techniques, fabrics, and ready-mades of the last two centuries are mixed with the visual languages of contemporary art. His artistic practice reflects the pulsing reality of Native American communities in the form of cultural criticism that addresses complex stories rather than erasing them. Here the mottos of the US Constitution, the temples of political Washington, nature, and the feminine are rethought.

Local artists are symbolically and colorfully represented at the main entrance welcoming the public into the Central Pavilion. There is a monumental mural on the facade of the building and in Corderie, created by the Brazilian collective Mahku, where the Maataho collective from Aotearoa, who came from New Zealand, presents a large installation in the first room. An explosion of a different color.

“Ethics is a perspective,” said the great philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This means that looking at reality becomes a way of life, relationships, and decision-making. So, if Pope Francis chose this year’s Art Biennale, it is, so to speak, out of an interest that is more “political” than artistic or purely religious. Venice is an avant-garde cultural event that allows the Global South to express itself with notable aesthetic force and puts the West itself face to face with its historical responsibilities of colonialism and oppression of peoples. It is as if the Pope were saying to all his brothers in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and even Europe: “We are with you in the night.” In the night where darkness hides you from everyone else and where instead we want to see and meet you.