For the first time in Italy, from May 8 to November 22, 2026, in St. Mark’s Square, in the spaces of theHotel Monaco & Grand Canal and on the occasion of the 61st Venice Biennale, comes Consultorio Mitologico, a project by the Spanish duo MITO (Enrique Baeza and Quim Bonastra), curated by Alex Brahim and Giovanna Cicutto. It is an artistic, social and participatory device that intends to observe the present, bringing out its contradictions and proposing itself at the same time as a critical tool and expressive means capable of generating new meanings.
In a society that constantly searches for definitive answers, Consultorio Mitologico, promoted by Loffredo Foundation for Arts & Inclusion and Iconic Art System, wants to bring attention back to the importance of questioning, uncertainty and listening to what is not immediately perceptible.
A phone booth.
A question addressed to the world.
A reflection on the present.
A note that returns an answer.
A sentence that can take the form of a prediction, an intuition, a symbolic suggestion or a linguistic game. An answer that does not provide solutions, but opens possibilities; that does not clarify, but invites reflection.
This is Consultorio Mitologico: a work that transforms an everyday gesture, that of asking a question, into ashared and symbolic experience, in which contemporary thought is intertwined with myth and language takes on an almost oracular function. Set up in the heart of Venice, the installation develops thanks to the direct involvement of the public, called not only to observe but to actively participate in a process of questioning and restitution. It is thus configured as acollective and participatory work, which gives space to the most silent and marginal voices, accepting Koyo Kouoh ’s reflection that today we are learning to listen not to what is forcefully imposed, but to what emerges at the margins. In this context, a device capable of making unexpected plots perceptible wants to take shape: a contemporary oracle that does not predict the future, but invites us to question the present.
“What appears in the booth as a minimal operation actually refers back to a broader and extremely precise practice,” the curators explain. “MITO has been working for years on the myths that naturalize as common sense and continue to organize imaginaries, behaviors and forms of authority in the midst of contemporaneity. It does not simply point them out: it intervenes, reconfigures them and returns them to public space under new conditions of reading and use.In Enrique Baeza this operation is manifested through the short phrase, verbal density and a use of language capable of moving between slogan, evocative formula and critical discharge. In Quim Bonastra, on the other hand, it emerges in the positioning, the spatial reading of the device, and the way a work is able to reorganize the social scene that surrounds it. Consultorio Mitologico concentrates both of these lines with a rare synthesis, turning a consultation into a situation, a response into an object, and a myth into an orientation protocol. Each response responds to a system of selection that introduces a margin of randomness: not everything is determined, but nothing is entirely arbitrary. Sentences circulate within this regime, where each appearance maintains a relation to the question without becoming completely attached to it. It is a mode of operation that belongs to our present and that the work activates without needing to declare it.”
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| A contemporary oracle in the center of Venice: Spanish duo MITO's Mythological Consultorio arrives in Italy |
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