Hi,
This is Thursday and we didn't do a lot today. We went back to the Giardini area and revisited the German Pavillion and saw some others we hadn't seen before.
We started out again from the Cipriani water taxi stop walking through the crowds at Saint Mark's Square.
Then through the gardens to the Giardini pavilions.
The first show we saw was the Petticoat Government at the Belgian Pavillion. It is a multidisciplinary scenario based on existing folkloric giants from various communities in Belgium, France, and Spain. the Belgian Pavilion is imagined as a place of passage, with a kaleidoscope perspective. Using these giant figures there were videos of festivals and interactions in a variety of locations with music and pageantry.
In the Spanish Pavillion Sandra Gamarra Heshiki's extensive research reveals the absence of decolonial narratives within museums, revealing the biased representations of colonizers and the colonized. Within this field of study, sociology, politics, art history, and biology intertwine to provide a reinterpretation, where too often ignored consequences of history connect to present-day racism, migration, and extractivism concerning both the ecological and museological crises.
In this gallery, you can see the colonizers in color - like the painting above and the native people in a fading reddish color. They are almost not there.
The Swiss pavilion presents the imaginations of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor titled Super Superior Civilizations.
This was in the first room.
This was an image of a trans person dancing and speaking but clearly, I couldn't photograph them. They were like some kind of oracle.
The next Pavillion was Finnish, Norwegian, and Sweden with an opera called the Altersea Opera. The idea started with this dragon head. I can't really tell you what it was about.
It was presented on this screen in this jungle of bamboo structures.
The Korean pavilion presented Odorama Cities by Koo Jeong. It featured this sculpture breathing out odors. It was an exhibition about scent.
Next, we went back to the German Pavillion to see the whole movie about having to leave the Earth in a spaceship and living in it for a millennium. Much of the video was filming a ritual for saying goodbye to the earth. Leaving it so it could heal without our presence. 98 people could be on each ship with food and everything they needed to survive. I'll show you a lot of the film which both Rose and I found fascinating. The music was otherworldly, loud, and insistent like ritual chants.
The End
We were attracted to the singing of these two performers. They were right in front of the Czech and Slovak Pavilion.
Then the Czech and Slovak Pavilion featured a show called The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity is Twelve Kilos Lighter by Eva Kotákova and the collective Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures. Lenka the giraffe was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity. It questions how we encounter view and learn about animals.
This was a light day and one where we were revisiting things we had already seen and I pooped out in the late afternoon. Probably a result of too much art and swimming energetically in the morning. Whew! I need a break.
Hugs,
Susan
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