Venice Biennale, Uruguay comes to the exhibition with its empathetic home

Entitled La casa empática (The Empathetic House ) is the exhibition that the Uruguay Pavilion is mounting at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale. The project was created by artist Yamandú Canosa (Montevideo, 1954) and is curated by Patricia Bentancur and David Armengol: the “house” designed by Canosa is intended to be a discursive and scenographic synthesis that encompasses his entire visual poetics. The title chosen by the artist anticipates two initial stimuli that unite his professional career and biography: the first is the symbolic allusion to home, to domestic space disassembled and reinterpreted through migratory movements, transit, desire and mestizo belonging, while the second is the notion of empathy, treated here as the ideal relationship with the other; a relationship necessary to define our identity in the cultural and racial complexities that shape the contemporary world.

The empathic house, the curators explain, "thus alludes to the instability of global social and political reality and does so from the perspective of complicity and diversity. With its utterance, Canosa invites us to solve a riddle steeped in intersecting meanings. Wittgenstein argued that the limits of our world are the limits of our own language, and Canosa offers us with these enveloping installations a narrative landscape constructed and inhabited by the language and cognitive and emotional experience of the gaze. The installation dialogues with 2019 Art Biennale curator Ralph Rugoff’s proposal, May You Live in Interesting Times, a statement that speaks to the uncertainty, crisis and turmoil in which we live."

The exhibition features paintings, drawings, photographs and wall interventions that order themselves into a “territory-landscape” of the world, a “total landscape” that aims to be inclusive and empathetic. Concepts such as territory, frontier, mestizaje, belonging, instability, and difference expand on the basis of the poetics of the artist’s vision, and in this landscape of the world the horizon articulates the iconographies of the four walls of the room: the South Wall, the East Wall, the North Wall, and the West Wall that insert the Uruguay Pavilion into the map of The Gardens. La casa empatica is accessed from the South: an intervention on the facade, a starry sky installed on the ceiling of the Pavilion and its reflection on the floor complete this total landscape.

In the photo: a part of La casa empática by Yamandú Canosa.

Read the ranking of the best pavilions of the 2019 Venice Biennale according to Finestre Sull’Arte

Venice Biennale, Uruguay comes to the exhibition with its empathetic home

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