To the curator it was supposed to be an exhibition “In Minor Keys.” A visit amidst controversies, clashes with the police, and African settings
A biennale that started badly, beginning with the death at only 57 years old of curator Koyo Kouoh, exactly one year ago, a few days before the press presentation of her exhibition. "In Minor Keys" is the title, borrowed from musical language. Minor key: words that taste of good things, of sweetness, of intimacy. Of melancholy, of dark atmospheres at times, of tones that always lower. As if to suggest: the truth is a whisper, a barely hinted sound that surfaces faintly from the soul. After so many shouted editions, this 2026 one seemed to be the announcement of a different way of approaching contemporaneity. Banishing summary and arrogant glances, haste, visual voracity, sterile polemics: the usual complaints about the lack of representation of Italian artists, or too many or too few women. We imagined ourselves walking with small steps and long pauses through the Giardini and Corderie to contemplate works capable of digging deep into ourselves and, in a whisper, revealing who we are. A sort of psychoanalytic session through art. Had it really happened, we would have liked it. Very much. Instead, no. And not even through the fault of Kouoh, or the team that with loyalty and passion brought the exhibition project to completion. We were wrong to take her statements literally, to forget that - as often happens -, between the theories of the critic and the creations of the artists called to translate them into works of art, the sea flows. As between saying and doing. An ingenuity, above all, to hypothesize the offer of an unprecedented vision from someone who, originally from Cameroon, had distinguished herself for her commitment to the art of the African diaspora and the research of black geographies. Understandably, she did what she knew how to do. With that minor key in mind, we were the ones in error to echo Chopin. The most suitable tone in these days in the lagoon is rather the obsessive and deafening one of the drum rolls of tribal music. And, once again, not because of Kouoh’s proposal. Yes, because this edition, which will be remembered as the biennale of discord, leads to observing with Quasimodo: “You are still the one of the stone and the sling, man of my time.” Here it is war, war everywhere. President Buttafuoco fighting for the right of Russia and Israel to participate, Culture Minister Giuli sending commissioners, the jury resigning, the European Commission threatening to cut funds. Topless Pussy Riot and Ukrainian Femen staging flash mobs in front of the Russian Pavilion. Air raid sirens and banners reading “Putin’s culture is a bomb” by radicals and Più Europa. Scuffles, tear gas, clashes between riot police and Pro-Pal protesters in Castello against the Israel pavilion. For the same reason, a lockdown of 20 national pavilions. Such a threatening climate had never been felt at the biennale, far from an UN of art. No one speaks of the minor key hoped for by the curator anymore. Let us try to do it. After all, we are here for this. Leaving our bellicose West behind, we find ourselves catapulted into the heart of the Third World. We wander through the rooms of the Central Pavilion, face the endless corridor of the Corderie and the Arsenale with the daze of those who thought they were in Venice and find themselves captured in a sub-Saharan village. From one restlessness to another. We wander among giant ostrich feathers, huge and flashy cloaks that belonged to some tribal chief. We encounter tangled snakes with forked tongues that one guesses are ready to snap for the fatal bite and tigers from whose wide-open jaws terrifying canines emerge. Then, bark and tree trunks here and there, terracottas that immortalize orgiastic embraces and sculptures that propose on an almost real scale sexual acts with pregnant women. Again, from the presumably feminine side, the revaluation of an archaic manual skill: beads, lace, and embroidery, a mountain of tiny red gloves. Wicker baskets stuffed with colored eggs and flowers, bamboo chairs filled with rags. Zero technology (how could they?) and paintings that, when they appear, seem like clumsy copies of Frida Kahlo, if not entirely insignificant. Photographs of the bad times that were. It is Africa. Her Africa. That of the curator, who transfers it to the 45th parallel north with annexed customs, traditions, and rituals. An imposing exhibition with a more ethnographic than artistic slant, among which one captures, however, the inevitable ecological, anti-colonialist, antiexploitation, anti-war, anti-capitalist positions. These, yes, in the jumble of hodgepodge we had to see, are in a minor key. They arrive like a rustle, a breath of wind in the high grass of the savannah. Appreciable delicacy.
