Venice Biennale Fellowship: Week Uno
This first week has been both magical and surreal all at once. Flying over mountains, lagoon networks and in the thick August pressure, we arrived in the land of canals.
Google Maps image of the Venice Lagoon
The place we are staying is in the district of Castello, about a 15 minute walk from the Giardini de Biennale (if you don’t get lost in the labyrinth of alleyways). From the airport, the closest stop is Celestia on a boat, or Vaperetto as they call it here. Between the meteor showers this week, the exhibition title “Dancing Before the Moon” and Celestia, it is already feeling like an adventure of cosmic capabilities. Our hosts sat us down and told us about the beams above our heads, which have been there for 700 years? In the book I’m reading, Venice and the Anthropocene, they talk about how Venice is built on wood and water. And that tree trunks up to 1000 years old sit in the lagoon mud and act as stilts for the city.
“Venice is an upside-down forest, made of millions of trees preserved by the anaerobic mud”.
There are seven other fellows in this wave for the British Pavilion, each one has a different practice spanning architecture to fine art and literature. We split our time between working at the Biennale itself, exploring Venice and undertaking our individual research projects. For the time at the Biennale, we sit among the works of Yussef Agbo-Ola, Madhav Kidao, Sandra Poulson, Mac Collins, Shawanda Corbett, and Jayden Ali, which highlight the central role that rituals play in reflecting the traditions and community values of people living in the UK.
The motifs that trail through this exhibition resonate deeply with both my work and my upbringing in East London. Jayden Ali’s piece guides you to a film which shows clips of the steel pan bands of Bethnal Green which inspired him; the same group which played at my primary school and was the chorus of most community events in Waltham forest. I have spent many hours under this piece already- two steel orbs hover above the Gret Bretagna entrace-way, with steel pan drumsticks so that people can interact with it, creating bellowing sounds of Thunder and Şimşek. Jayden speaks about the energy that music, cooking and the weather can create, filling spaces with pulsating sounds. As you sit under the piece, the sound of the cicadas are the metronome for the drums, expanding to the rest of the gardens. This was the first time hearing cicadas, and if you haven’t before they are a cloud of white noise as they rub their wings together. It is way louder than you expect, but reminded me that the Giardini, where the Biennale sits, is very much alive and is a metaphor for the nature vs culture questions of our time. Little bugs fly under the reflections of the steel plates, it looks like the craters of the moon, so their hovering and dancing under its surface felt very fitting for the exhibition.
For my research project, I plan to continue my practice of engaging with the natural environment. Venice really feels like a metaphor for the rest of the world, as this tiny island is saturated in the waters it’ll succumb to. Something I’ve found quite interesting while being here is the lack of green spaces, to even touch water freely you have to go to another island and even then some are private. Instead, in my first few days I met a pigment producer at Arcobolena, using traditional processes of paint making that I have adapted for my own work. He explains that pigments are made using mineral or organic origins, ground into these jars and used as the base for most Venetian paintings.