Cecilia Alemani presents her Biennial: technology, the body and the Earth at the center

The themes of the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which will take place from April 23 to November 27, 2022 in the traditional venues of the Giardini and Arsenale and twenty other places in the lagoon city, were announced today: the Director, Cecilia Alemani, who was appointed in January 2020, let it be known that her exhibition will be titled The Milk of Dreams. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a book by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (Clayton Green, 1917 - Mexico City, 2011): in the book, Cecilia Alemani explains, Carrington herself “describes a magical world in which life is constantly reinvented through the prism of the imagination and in which one is allowed to change, to transform, to become other than oneself. The exhibition proposes an imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human.”

Carrington, the director explains, "in the 1950s in Mexico imagined and illustrated mysterious fairy tales first directly on the walls of her home, and then collected them in a little book called precisely The Milk of Dreams. Told in a dreamlike style that seemed to terrify adults and children alike, Carrington’s stories imagine a free world full of endless possibilities, but also the allegory of a century that imposes on identity intolerable pressure, forcing Carrington to live as an exile, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, a perpetual object of fascination and desire but also a figure of rare strength and mystery, always escaping the constraints of a fixed and consistent identity."

It is an exhibition that, Cecilia Alemani further recounts, “stems from the many conversations held with many women artists in recent months. From these dialogues, a series of questions emerged insistently that not only evoke this precise historical moment in which the very survival of humanity is threatened, but also summarize many other questions that have dominated the sciences, arts and myths of our time. How is the definition of human changing? How do we define life and what are the differences that separate animal, plant, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities to our fellow human beings, to other life forms, and to the planet we inhabit? And what would life be like without us?”

There will be three thematic areas around which the Biennale’s 59th international exhibition will be developed: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; and the links that weave between bodies and the Earth. “Many contemporary artists,” Alemani says about the themes of the exhibition, "are imagining a post-human condition, questioning the modern and Western vision of the human being (in particular the presumed universal idea of a white, male subject, ’man of reason’ (as the center of the universe and as the measure of all things). In its place, they contrast worlds made up of new alliances between different species and inhabited by permeable, hybrid and multiple beings, such as the fantastic creatures invented by Carrington. Under the pressure of increasingly invasive technologies, the boundaries between bodies and objects have been completely transformed, imposing profound mutations that reshape new forms of subjectivity and reconfigure hierarchies and anatomies. Today the world appears dramatically divided between technological optimism,which promises the infinite refinement of the human body through science, and the specter of a total takeover by machines through automation and artificial intelligence. This divide has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has trapped much of human interaction behind the surfaces of screens and electronic devices and further intensified social distances. In recent months, the fragility of the human body has become tragically more evident but at the same time has been kept at a distance, filtered by technology, made almost immaterial and disembodied. The pressures of technology, the outbreak of pandemics, heightened social tensions and the threat of incipient environmental disasters remind us every day that as mortal bodies we are neither invincible nor self-sufficient, but rather are part of a system of symbiotic dependencies that bind us to one another, to other species and to the entire planet. Many artists portray the end of anthropocentrism, celebrating a new communion with the non-human, with the animal and the earth, enhancing a sense of kinship between species and between the organic and the inorganic, between the animate and the inanimate. Others react to the dissolution of supposed universal systems by rediscovering local forms of knowledge en new identity politics. Still others practice what feminist philosopher and activist Silvia Federici describes as the ’re-enchantment of the world,’ mixing indigenous knowledge and individual mythologies in ways not unlike those imagined by Leonora Carrington. If the events of recent months have shaped a torn and divided world, the exhibition The Milk of Dreams tries to imagine other forms of coexistence and transformation. Therefore, despite the climate in which it was born, The Milk of Dreams aspires to be an optimistic exhibition, celebrating art and its ability to create alternative cosmologiesnew conditions of existence. The exhibition looks at women artists not as those who reveal to us who we are, but rather as those who can absorb the anxieties and concerns of these times to show us who and what we can become."

Satisfied by La Biennale Foundation President Roberto Cicutto, “Cecilia Alemani,” he said, "puts at the center of her ’imaginary journey through the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human’ a series of questions about ’issues that have dominated the sciences, arts and myths of our time.’ Also the title of the 17th. International Architecture Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis is a question: ’How will we live together?’ Two choices resulting from the current times devoid of certainties that burden humanity with immense responsibilities. Cecilia Alemani in 2020 coordinated the work of the directors of all sectors of the Biennale (Art, Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music, Theater) to create the Exhibition The Restless Muses. The Biennale in the Face of History. The restlessness and the assumption of responsibility inherent in the artistic act werethe inspiration for that Exhibition that told much of the Biennale’s story. Today the starting point of the next Art Biennale seems to be the reinvention of new and more sustainable relationships between individuals and everything that populates the universe in which we live. There could be no better way for Cecilia Alemani to open, through these two experiences, new doors for the Biennales of the future."

The 59th. International Art Exhibition will present, as usual, the National Participations with their own exhibitions in the Pavilions at the Giardini and Arsenale, as well as in the historic center of Venice. Collateral Events are also planned for this edition, proposed by international bodies and institutions, which will set up their own exhibitions and initiatives in Venice. Finally, the Biennale would like to thank the Leonora Carrington Estate for its support.

Pictured: Cecilia Alemani. Photo by Andrea Avezzù

Cecilia Alemani presents her Biennial: technology, the body and the Earth at the center

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