Venezia, 9 May. (askanews) – The Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale presents The Unfinished Business of Living Together, an exhibition conceived by the curators Gianmaria Andreetta and Luca Beeler together with the artist Nina Wakeford and created in collaboration with the artists Miriam Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance and Yul Tomatala.
The curator Gianmaria Andreetta described to askanews what the visitor will find: “This year there is a collective exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion. Starting from the archives of Swiss television we conceived this pavilion as a kind of montage in the space where architecture and the space of the video meet. We played a bit with the original architecture of Bruno Giacometti by creating new walls and a new way of orientation: this space was historically conceived to have sculptures in a semi-open space, graphic works in the glass space and then paintings in the larger space. There is it seemed natural to reconfigure the spaces to be able to create suitable video spaces also from an acoustic point of view. We worked starting from this Swiss archive, two very specific moments 1978 and 1984, when for the first time queer people in Switzerland were invited on television, live to express themselves about their lives. This moment of visibility is very important and is also quite unknown. In the main space, in the painting room, you can see an hour-long montage made up of television archives and the new works of the artists. we helped work on this subject, on this moment in Swiss history and on this archive. We wanted to work with time as artistic material and the distance that time creates on how we can understand certain historical events, even romanticize them. This was a bit of our approach to using distance as an artistic process and material: the choice of black and white, the color wall, the black and white copy of the bricks and then these glitches between the black and white color reappear throughout the pavilion”.
The project uses art to revitalize the archive as a space for intervention and active debate. The exhibition starts from the voices taken from an episode of the Telearena television program, broadcast live in April 1978, during which the so-called “problem of homosexuality” was discussed publicly and in a contradictory manner. This broadcast marked one of the first occasions in which individuals who identified as homosexuals gained a mainstream public voice beyond subcultural groups. This theme was taken up again in 1984 by the French-speaking talk show Agora, which brought the Swiss, French and Canadian public into contact via satellite. Both programs used short skits written by the writers of the respective television stations to stimulate debate in the studio and encourage the audience to express their opinions on the topic based on their own experiences. The debate around this topic reveals recurring patterns of more general scope such as state security requiring surveillance practices or moral panic regarding the nuclear family, which show us how various forms of difference end up being perceived as threats to the social order.
The exhibition is the result of collaborative artistic and curatorial work. Each member of the group brought their own skills to the project. The Unfinished Business of Living Together experiments with how voices, spaces and perspectives can be shared and need to be constantly reconfigured.
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