When the stranger is familiar: “Stranieri Ovunque” at the Venice Biennale

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere is the evocative title of the sixtieth edition of the 2024 Art Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, which can be visited between the Gardens and the Arsenale until 24 November 2024. “The expression Stranieri Ovunque has more than one meaning. First of all, it means that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners: they are/we are everywhere. Secondly, that regardless of one’s location, deep down one is always truly a foreigner,” explains Pedrosa.

It is no coincidence that in most languages ​​the word “foreigner” is associated with the concept of stranger, while in Portuguese “o estranho” indicates the strangeness that is intimately familiar. An excellent description of today’s world, “full of multifaceted crises that express differences and disparities conditioned by identity, citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, freedom and wealth”.

Arsenal

Stranieri Ovunque is not only the title of the Biennale, but it is also the name of the colorful neon sculptures of the Claire Fontaine collective – born in Paris and based in Palermo – exhibited in the Arsenale alle Gaggiandre. The installations report the words “foreigners everywhere” in more than fifty languages, including some extinct indigenous ones, evoking a sense of alienation in a highly globalized society: each of us can be a stranger to someone or something in our lives. The exhibition is divided between the Central Pavilion in the Giardini and the Arsenale into two distinct nuclei: Contemporary Nucleus and Historical Nucleus. The first focuses on connected subjects such as the queer artist, who moves within different sexualities and genders; the outsider artist, who finds himself on the margins of the art world typical of the self-taught; the so-called folk or popular artist; the indigenous artist, often treated like a stranger in his own land.

The Historical Core, on the other hand, is composed of 20th century works from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Arab world and includes three rooms in the Central Pavilion: the room entitled Photographs (with works by 112 artists), the room on Abstractions (37 artists present) and a third room dedicated to the Italian artistic diaspora in the world throughout the 20th century (forty authors placed in the glass and concrete easel displays by Lina Bo Bardi, winner of the special Golden Lion in memory of the Biennale Architecture 2021).

Central Pavilion in the Gardens

The first notable work of the Central Pavilion in the Gardens is the majestic mural painted by MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin): the indigenous artistic collective from the Amazon narrates – through seven hundred and fifty square meters of sacred visions mediated by ayahuasca – the myth of ” kapewë pukeni” (the alligator who offered to ferry the men across the Bering Strait and by whom he was betrayed), a story regarding the intercontinental separation between peoples and the strengthening of bonds between foreigners. Proof of how art acts as a means of connection and resistance.