La Biennale

When we landed in Venice, the smartly dressed and well pressed young man who escorted us to our water taxi asked what our plans were for Venice, what would we see? What would we do? I explained that, while we had tours scheduled to see the city, our big plans were to visit the Venice Biennale.

“Ah, la Biennale…” he responded as if that explained everything.

The Venice Biennale was the seed that grew into our Italian vacation. It was our reason, or at least my driving reason for visiting Italy. A trip to Venice to see art was my 50th birthday present to myself.

Our jam-packed trip allowed us to visit the Biennale twice. Our first visit was to the Giardini Della Biennale. Our vaporetto chugged eastward to the mouth of the Grand Canal to the historic, 19th century gardens which have been the home of the Biennale since the beginning. Along the canal we saw the bright red signs and crowds of visitors making their way to the entrance. The vaporetto pulled up to the dock as the attendant who managed the passengers deftly tossed a thick, heavy rope around a big steel post on the dock. With a little twist and a flip of his wrist, the rope knotted itself securely and creaked, snapped, and popped as the boat pulled the rope tight, then pulled itself against the dock with athump.

We disembarked from the boat, turned right, and followed the signs and the crowds. A large, semi-temporary, gently sloped aluminum ramp was built up and over the traditional marble steps bridging a small canal, making the gardens wheelchair accessible.We collected our passes at the entrance and made our way into the gardens past a restaurant guarded by a giant bronze goddess.

I really didn’t know what to expect. I deliberately went in a bit blind. I didn’t do any research. I just wanted to be there and see what there was to see and learn all about it.

The Giardini is dotted with international pavilions, small buildings which host a country’s contribution to the Biennale. Some pavilions are small, some are grand, some are architectural wonders. The United States pavilion is a postmodern pastiche of neoclassical architecture reminiscent of the US capital. This year Jeffrey Gibsonrepresented the United States in a solo exhibition and the US pavilion was painted in a bold patchwork colors work of colors matching his artwork.

We wandered around and through the different pavilions, admiring the art and sometimes just the buildings. Sometimes a country will lend its pavilion to another country which can create an interesting friction between politics of the art and the country named over the doorway. We found lunch

The title of the Biennale this year was “Foreigners Everywhere” which, for a city often overrun by tourists, evokes perhaps a different meaning than intended broad inclusivity and diversity the show is aiming for.

We looked at art until our brains were full. You can’t see everything. I try not to make art exhibitions into a marathon. If the art is blurring together and you can’t remember which century you’re looking at, it’s past time for a break. When you leave an art exhibition, you should feel energized and perhaps inspired. You should not be exhausted.

We will come back to the Biennale in 2 days.

The following day we toured St. Marks square, the Doge’s palace, and the adjoining cathedral. We learned about Casanova’s incarceration there and his outrageous escape. I recalled seeing a movie about Casanova as a child. It must have been the made-for-tv movie and not the Fellini film. My memory of the movie prison cell matched well with the real thing.

The following day we took our time coming back to the Biennale. The venues are open well into the evening, plenty of time. We took the vaporetto to the same stop as the previous day. This time we took a left and followed the signs to the Arsenale venue. We found ourselves on a wide boulevard. Strange for Venice. I had become accustomed to narrow walkways between buildings or along canals. I assumed that this boulevard must have once been a canal, filled in to create space for shopping and dining.

I learned much later through Google Mapping and internet sleuthing that this street, Via Garibaldi was, in fact, a canal converted into a boulevard by Napoleon.

Along the way we stopped for wine and a snack. Dotted all over Venice you can find small cafés which are something between a bar and a coffee shop. They serve mainly wine and small appetizers called cicchetti, small servings of bruschetta with interesting toppings. Two is a snack, four is a meal. Our café had a few tall tables out in the street, a big hand-written menu of wines by the glass, and a glass case of beautiful toasts covered in savory delights. Mrs. Barrett used her very best DuoLingo Italian to ask about the wines. The women working the café found this endearing and took extra care of us.

We slid off our tall barstools and followed signs to the Biennale. The sun was setting and as we cut through a small alleyway to get to the venue we watched an older man, neck craned back, having a conversation with a woman on the second floor, pinning laundry to a clothesline which spanned the street.

Before we arrived at the official entrance, we bumbled into a pop-up location for Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung. The exhibition space was dark, eerily lit with purple lights. The artist sought to recreate his experience of being a child and visiting pet stores and hiding among the aquariums. Rows of stacks of aquariums, glowed under strange light, and bubbled away. The effect was incredible. I was immediately a kid staring at fish in the back of a giant pet store in Charlotte. Interestingly, there were no fish. Just aquariums.

We left the bubbling water to find the Arsenale. We presented our passes and as we entered a voice on the loudspeaker admonished that closing time was fast approaching.

What? No, we have plenty of time.

We did not have plenty of time. We learned that we misread the hours. Those hours we read were summer hours. It is October. Autumn hours close early.

God damn it.

I took off through the space. I hurried to try to see as much as I could before I was kicked out. I was hoping to see something, anything, profound or great so that my last day wouldn’t be a waste.

I power walked past lots of things, pausing only for moments at things that I thought I should look up later. Fine, fine, good, no, no, good, no. Room after room.

The space is enormous, a vast old building with a pitched roof, and brick columns. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been a great place to wander and ponder. But now I wanted to take home something.

I got lucky.

I passed a claptrap assemblage over a square pool of water into a darkened room. I stumbled into The Mapping Journey by Bouchra Khalili.

The darkened space had carpeted floors, to prevent echoing footsteps. About ten, maybe a dozen video screens hung from the rafters on wire. On each screen was projected a map. Then I noticed subtitles. Then I noticed a hand with a pen drawing on a map.

I chose a screen and watched. An unseen narrator with a marker, mapped out a journey, while explaining what happened to them along the way. The narrators were migrant workers from Northern or Eastern Africa, the Middle East, or South Asia. They recalled their journey to try to get to mainland Europe to find work.

The stories were harrowing in their detail, but each narrator was so matter of fact. “That’s just life” you could imagine them saying. They jumped trains, hid in box cars, took buses, hitchhiked, walked, got scammed by devious uncles, got robbed. They lost their papers, got nabbed by the authorities and sent home. They would get word of work or a supportive family member in, say, Spain, and then embark on an epic journey to get there only to find the work had evaporated. Each story was moving and the presentation was so simple and effective.

Some narrators traced the roads and rail lines they traveled on. Some drew straight lines from place to place, inadvertently creating patterns of interlocking triangles. The maps got cluttered with marker as the stories unfolded. Often the stories ended “and here I am today”.

The exhibition space, with many screens gave me a sense of scale. That there are many such stories. But the format was so simple and perfect it would work in a movie theater, as a streaming documentary, or a YouTube channel. Just brilliant. This was the most profound and moving artwork I have seen in years.

We left as folks in official attire started shooing folks towards the door. We walked to the exit bifurcated. I was partly enraptured by this artwork, but also just so damn mad that we messed up the entrance times.

On our way back to the vaporetto, we walked down a side street next to a canal. We found a busy restaurant with lots of outdoor seating. we took a table and ordered wine and pizza.

I sat and brooded for several minutes. Eventually the wine worked and I started to feel better. The Biennale will be here again in 2026 and I can be too. You can’t see everything.