[lbo-talk] "Stateless Nation" at the Venice Biennale

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   New York Times   June 1, 2003
The Venice Biennale's Palestine Problem
By CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE
VENICE

IF the title of this year's Venice Biennale, "Dreams and Conflicts," 
sounds like the name of a documentary on Middle East politics, well, 
you don't have to point that out to the man who came up with it. 
Francesco Bonami, the Chicago-based Italian curator who is the 
director of the 50th Biennale, has learned a sharp lesson over the 
last year about how, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian divide, 
those words are practically synonymous.

Not long after taking up the Venice directorship in March 2002, Mr. 
Bonami mentioned in a briefing to the Biennale's board that he was 
considering adding a Palestinian pavilion to this year's exhibition, 
which opens June 15. The next morning he woke up to find an article 
on the plan in Il Gazzettino, the major Venetian daily, which 
included criticism of it as needlessly provocative or even 
anti-Semitic....

Following what Mr. Bonami now calls simply "the turmoil," he scaled 
back his original plan. Instead of a building filled with Palestinian 
art, the show will include an installation on Palestinian identity in 
the form of 10 seven-foot-high passports that will be dispersed 
around the grounds. The work, called "Stateless Nation," was designed 
by Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian born in Bethlehem, and her Italian 
husband, Alessandro Petti, both of whom are trained as architects.

 From the outset, the issue has been complicated by the Biennale's 
unusual two-tiered structure. Each edition of the show features a 
large group of artworks selected by the director - and by guest 
curators, a group Mr. Bonami has expanded this year - and arranged 
around a guiding theme. These works are shown in locations around the 
city, including the old shipbuilding yards called the Arsenale and 
the Giardini, gardens on the eastern edge of Venice.

But the gardens also include 32 national pavilions: permanent, 
free-standing buildings, from mansion- to maisonette-size, that line 
a series of shaded walkways. The pavilions, designed by architects 
including Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld and Carlo Scarpa, are filled 
with art chosen by their host countries. It was here that Mr. Bonami 
considered adding a building representing the Palestinians, though he 
admitted he hadn't thought much about the art or who might have 
selected it.

As a group the pavilions make up a sort of imperfect United Nations 
for the art world. While newly established or reconstituted nations 
like Estonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina have been added to the 
Biennale, some countries share pavilions, and more than 100, 
including most African and South American countries, are not 
represented at all. Israel has had a pavilion since 1952. Among Arab 
nations, only Egypt has one. Artists often criticize the system of 
pavilions as a Euro-centric relic.

At the same time that the political controversy was erupting, Mr. 
Bonami learned that his plans faced bureaucratic obstacles, too. It 
turns out that the state-financed Biennale is subject to what he 
called "certain foreign-policy regulations" - notably, that pavilions 
can represent only those countries officially recognized by Rome....

Last fall, eager to find a compromise, Mr. Bonami approached Ms. 
Hilal, 30, who was researching issues related to citizenship and 
globalization for her doctorate at a university in Gorizia, on the 
Italian border with Slovenia. She suggested that she collaborate with 
her husband, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in urban studies in Venice, and 
Mr. Bonami agreed.

She and Mr. Petti chose passports, Ms. Hilal said, because 
Palestinians, whose movement in Israel and the occupied territories 
is often restricted, "are absolutely obsessed with travel documents 
of all kinds; we can't afford not to be."

She added: "If you consider that more than half of all Palestinians 
are living outside of Palestine, then what is Palestine right now? Is 
it simply a limited geographic area? If Palestinians are dispersed 
all over the world, and if we think of the Biennale as a metaphor for 
the world, then Palestinians should be dispersed all over the 
Biennale. I would have represented the Palestinians this way even if 
he had asked us specifically to design a pavilion. For us, this is 
the Palestinian pavilion."

The installation, which includes identification cards and travel 
documents issued by the Palestinian Authority and the governments of 
Israel and Lebanon, among others, blown up to Brobdingnagian scale, 
is part of continuing research on Palestinian identity, Ms. Hilal 
said. An accompanying book, to be published this month by Marsilio, 
features interviews she and Mr. Petti conducted with 34 Palestinians 
around the world....

[The full text is available at 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/arts/design/01HAWT.html>.]   *****
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>