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| Other Biennials Lecture, IED Venice, September 22, 2020 |
By Claudio Cravero
Last September, the MA in Curatorial Practice at IED Venice (I) organized “Other Biennials,” a lecture series to investigate international art biennials beyond the Biennale par excellence: Venice.
Eight speakers from twelve biennial experiences across the world offered to six international students their insights on how biennials function as a node of globally conceived concepts within their local and site-specific contexts.
It turned out that a biennial is a complex, well-structured organism. However, a common denominator frames biennials as every-two-years platforms wanting to say more than the previous ones to an increasingly larger audience. Nevertheless, to avoid self-repetition, this structure must be openly self-renewing.
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| Oslo Biennial, Photo by Inger Marie Grini, © osloBIENNALEN |
Hence the analysis “6 Cases” by IED students to reimagine the future of biennials. The open structure is a metaphor for something that can be easily transformed, always in transit, and potentially translated into different languages, be it artistic, cultural, political, scientific, or ideological. Thus, the structure becomes a prerequisite for creativity to use existing elements tested by other biennials, each time assembling a new configuration with new content.
Presented in six short episodes, “6 Cases” shows how the future generations of curators would envision the biennial realm in the next ten years. Eventually, as the 2020 pandemic has already halted some of the ongoing events or postponed others until further notice, biennials will have to be “more”: more equitable, more context-specific and community-oriented, greener, or even moving towards their physical disappearance; biennials must be reshaped.