Rarely has a press conference been followed with so much attention. On January 31, in the hall of the columns of the Ca’Giustinian, a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italian journalists listen to the Brazilian exhibition curator Adriano Pedrosa draw the outlines of the next Biennale of Contemporary Art, which will open its opens to the public on April 20. This, he promises, will be bountiful – three hundred and thirty-two artists – and political.
The edition will shed light on the forgotten creators of the Southern hemisphere, neglected arts such as textiles, indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands and queer minorities, Adriano Pedrosa recalling that he is the “first openly homosexual commissioner” of the Biennale. As for the title of this edition, “Foreigners everywhere”, it comes from a work by Claire Fontaine, a duo of artists based in Palermo, a work which refers to the name of an active anti-racist collective from Turin in Italy in the early 2000s.
The title is sadly prophetic, recalls Adriano Pedrosa: according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of displaced people has never been as high as in 2023. “Wherever you go, you will always meet strangers, continues the exhibition curator who says he has often been treated like someone from ” Third World “. “No matter where you are, deep down you are always a stranger,” he concludes.
Amazing character
While blackening their notebooks, the journalists watch for the reactions of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the new president of the Biennale, seated in the front row, a brown-haired sixty-year-old with an angular face. Appointed in November 2023 by the government of Giorgia Meloni, for a period of four years, the intellectual is a declared supporter of the Italian Prime Minister, whose post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party attacks migrants, LGBT + activists and Against racism. In short, everything that this new edition of the Biennale embodies.
The new strong man of the Venice Biennale is an astonishing character. Born in Catania in 1963, this philosophy graduate cut his teeth in Secolo d’Italia, the press organ of the post-fascist party MSI (Italian Social Movement), of which his uncle was one of the figures, as well as the very conservative Il Giornale, which belonged to the Berlusconi family. But the non-conformist also signs in left-wing newspapers such as La Repubblica where the Corriere della Sera. A man of letters, author of several works, he was also a member of the central committee of the MSI, then of Alleanza Nazionale, another far-right party, until 2003.
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