Venice Biennale, Milovan Farronato imagined an exhibition-labyrinth for his Italian Pavilion

The presentation of the Italian Pavilion of the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale was held yesterday at the Sala Spadolini of the Collegio Romano, headquarters of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, in the presence of the curator, Milovan Farronato(his profile can be found on this page), minister Alberto Bonisoli, the president of the Biennale, Paolo Baratta, and the general director of art, architecture, urban peripheries as well as commissioner of the Pavilion, Federica Galloni. The title chosen by Farronato for the Pavilion is Neither other nor this: the challenge to the labyrinth, a name that echoes Italo Calvino ’s essay entitled precisely The Challenge to the Labyrinth, with which the great writer addressed the problem of a literature open to all possible languages. For Calvino, as for Farronato, the labyrinth becomes a symbol of complexity , especially the complexity of knowledge, as well as that of contemporaneity. This will be the underlying theme of the Pavilion.

“Venice,” said the curator, "is a labyrinth that over the centuries has fascinated and inspired the imagination of so many creative people, including Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, the two greatest contemporary labyrinthologists according to mathematician Pierre Rosenstiehl. Venice, the undisputed cartographic center of the Renaissance, is described by Calvino as a place where maps are always to be redone since the boundaries between land and water are constantly changing, making the spaces of this city dominated by uncertainty and variability. It is in this context that Neither Other Nor This takes shape, an exhibition in which the works on display will be in close dialogue with each other and with the setting, generating new paths and new interpretations, ’branching out like a mycelium.’"

And to better immerse visitors in the context of the labyrinth challenge, the exhibition itself will be a kind of labyrinth, with the public free to choose the desired path by walking in one direction or another, and with a layout that will hold surprises and allow them to experience many possible paths. There will even be two possible entrances, resulting in two completely different visit routes.

As already revealed a few months ago, there will be three artists selected for the Italian Pavilion: Liliana Moro (Milan, 1961), Enrico David (Ancona, 1966) and Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978 - Bari, 2017). On display will be works already exhibited in the past but also new works. Even for Chiara Fumai, the artist who died prematurely in August two years ago, there will be a new work, a project she was working on before she died, and on which Farronato has philologically worked with all the material left by the performer. The exhibition, which will cost nearly 1.3 million euros (600,000 guaranteed by the Ministry and the remainder covered by private sponsors found thanks in part to the curator), will be accompanied by a catalog published by Humboldt Books.

Satisfaction from Minister Bonisoli, who comments, “Italian creativity confirms its importance on the international scene with the Italian Pavilion project at the next Art Biennale, which combines the novelty of the curator’s vision with the skill of the artists and the quality of the research.”

In the photo: Milovan Farronato

Venice Biennale, Milovan Farronato imagined an exhibition-labyrinth for his Italian Pavilion

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