Inside the Cantieri Navali, the usual headquarters of the Catalan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, these days the sound of the flocks of parrots flying over the upper area of Barcelona, the screeches of bats, the hisses of snakes, resonate. the braying of donkeys, the humming of bees, the clicking of dolphins and the trumpeting of elephants. Visitors not only hear them through the speakers in the form of sculptures that surround the ship, but through their bodies they also feel infrasounds and ultrasounds that are imperceptible to the human ear but that create an unexpected avalanche of sensations, as happens with the musical vibes.
We are in the Bestiari conceived by the artist and filmmaker Carlos Casas and the curator Filipa Ramos and on the screen in the background the landscapes of twelve natural parks parade, images taken from a drone view that will transform into almost psychedelic visions. The landscapes are the same, but that is how the animals we are listening to see and understand them.
In the midst of the visual noise of the Venice Biennale, the Catalan pavilion promoted by the Institut Ramon Llull as one of its Eventi collaterali, seems a place out of time where the discussion between a friar and a donkey about the supposed human superiority that Anselm Turmeda described in 1417 in The dispute of l'ase connects with this current world "so violent and where nature and biodiversity have been systematically marginalized, to the point that nature finds itself as a foreigner in its own home," he points out. Ramos, for whom it is a space where we can wish, imagine and make a different future a reality for the relationships we establish with other species.
“That's the idea,” says Carlos Casas. “That whoever enters here can get closer to the other species, that he observes the environment in a different way, that he opens his eyes and has a transformative experience.”
Turmeda, who is at the origin of the project and whose thinking permeates the entire sensory installation, was a pioneer of ecological thinking, who described the way in which bees build a much more complex architecture than humans; the ability of swallows to travel and orient themselves in space infinitely superior to humans and even how ants surpass us in family care. Bestiari, where Marina Herlop's voice joins the animals' soundtrack, has received a contribution from Ramon Llull of 260,000 euros and can be seen in the future in Barcelona, possibly at the Macba.
Outside of the Biennale, although also sheltered from the hustle and bustle that surrounds Piazza San Marco, Jaume Plensa has found another space for serenity, the Chiesa di San Gallo, the smallest in Venice, nine steps wide by twenty long. . “It is an ideal space because what I was looking for was interiorization, the almost individual relationship between you and your spirituality, what William Faulkner called the relationship between you and your heart,” says the artist, just a few hours before the exhibition opens. to the public. He has titled it Janus, after the Roman god who had one look at the past and another at the future. “This double view of tradition and avant-garde is something that human beings always carry within; the permanent contradiction between history and the fear of what will happen tomorrow. But the idea that I liked the most is that they only opened the temple of Janus when there was war and this exhibition will always have its doors open because the world is always at war.”
On each of the three altars, the artist has placed a small head in white Murano glass, with a serene face and a finger on its lips, as if inviting a state of silent contemplation. In the center, three alabasters from which portraits of young women emerge, as if releasing from within the stones “the feminine, which is the great transforming force of the world. A point of birth.”
Plensa has not yet had time to visit the Biennial, one of whose central themes is migration, but he says that more than that, what really obsesses him “is the pain of war. Civil society is being destroyed, something very difficult to justify.” That's why he was interested in a "mirror of silence", a place of meditation in a Biennale where "everything is big and impressive", a minimal space in a city, Venice, "which was the result of vanity and excess. Now from art we criticize the political world a lot but it was power and wealth that transformed the city into these wonderful palaces that we now use for contemporary art.”
Janus is Plensa's third exhibition in Venice, the last in 2015, in the grandeur of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, but he has never been invited to represent Spain or Catalonia. He would like? “I don't have any need, it's not that they don't ask me for it. I have always worked as if floating, in a parallel world.”
