work.
Collectively, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia, explains the
relationship of the work to the City of Venice in this way:
This Biennale Arte, then, hosts samples of
marginalised, excluded, oppressed beauty, erased by the dominant matrices of geo-thinking. The interlacing themes of Pedrosa’s Exhibition – the different, the foreigner, the journey, integration – will reverberate nowhere better than in the calm and ever- renewed waters of the lagoon city. Once again Venice - over the centuries an open cradle of knowledge and communication between peoples, ethnicities, religions - is the natural forum in which to marshal new points of view and Fare Mondi (‘Making Worlds’) - to adopt the local lexicon of an earlier Biennale Arte 2009.
That same impulse that drove Marco Polo – the 700th anniversary of whose death will be celebrated in this same 2024 – to meet and explore cultures seen as distant and
threatening: finding acceptance, as a foreigner in those lands, by virtue of a sincere openness to human and equal exchange. Those were times when the Rialto market teemed with languages, ethnicities, styles and vitality. And many countries had Fondeghi – trade centres in
modern terms – in Venice: Turks, Syrians, Germans... showcasing their goods and expertise. Biennale Arte – with its National
Pavilions, artefacts, artists and visitors from all
over the world – was already there in embryo. For Venice, in fact, diversity has stood from the outset as a basic condition of normality. A process of mirroring and confrontation with the Other, never perceived in terms of denial or rejection. A process of mirroring and confrontation with the Other, never perceived in
terms of denial or rejection.
In this regard, Adriano Pedrosa sums up the event and location by pushing the notion even further:
In Venice, foreigners are everywhere. Yet, one may also think of the expression as a motto, a slogan, a call to action, a cry—of excitement, joy, or fear: Foreigners everywhere!
The exhibition runs through Sunday, 24 November 2024.
1 Italicized passages are taken from respective press releases of the 60th International Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The list of artists which follow are also provided by the press office. We thank fhe press offices for both contributions.
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