Passages in Time
A family trip to the 60th Venice Biennale
“Is it possible for history to be poetic?” Olivier asked as we ate mozzarella tomato sandwiches in the park on our last day in Venice. We had just seen William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, twice. Though we had not seen every video—only three and a half out of the nine videos in the series. In this episodic series of “self-portraits,” Kentridge films himself in his studio during the COVID lockdown in Johannesburg. But, he is not alone. First, he has several actors, dancers, or assistants make appearances. Additionally, he has doubled himself via camera effect and so there are two of him, talking to each other. We all wondered why he chose to double himself, and agreed it was a way to have some doubt, to not speak in certainties but to question, to ponder. Kentridge is good at this. He asks a lot of terrific spontaneous philosophical questions and in one scene he acts as both the therapist and the patient.
Sóley noticed that Kentridge isn’t afraid of making mistakes when he draws. He is expressive, gestural, and suddenly there appears an extremely realistic image. This is mostly with charcoal, his favored material, which he uses for his ability to erase - especially when making stop motion animations. He also paints with big brushes of ink and red pencil.
Ink made an appearance the next day in the biennale. In the Australian pavilion, artist Archie Moore “traces his Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations back 65,000+ years, including the common ancestors of all humans.” The long list of names written on the black walls with white chalk sprawl up to the ceiling. On the floor, a large bath of black ink (which you could smell) created a sense of unease in the space. The names felt endless, the room felt fragile. In the center of the ink pool, was a table with pristine white documents and I felt like the wind could easily blow them into the ink below. My mom also observed, from the names on the wall, that chalk is a material that can be erased and it will in fact be erased once the Biennale is over. All we have left, once something is erased, is memory. This reminds me of when Kentridge, in his Episode 3, asked “How could we know it was ever here?” He thinks about objects in space, but also places in Johannesburg that once existed and are now gone. He also thinks about himself as he is aging, he shows a portrait of his granddaughter, and then of a tree that existed in his youth. He takes objects in his studio and moves them. “How can I make the passage palpable?” he asks as he sends one piece of paper flying to be caught by his double.
I thought of all the other artworks that made attempts at tracing people through time, such as Bouchra Khalili’s “The Mapping Journey Project” in which individuals trace their migratory routes on maps. From Morocco to Marseille to London, for example.
In Khalili’s work, much like Kentridge’s, there is this attempt to understand the trajectory of a person in space and time.
There was also the trajectory of sound in many artworks of the biennale. In the Italian pavilion, a large scaffolding is used as organ pipes, the sound (composed by Kali Malone and Caterina Barbieri) travels through the scaffolding and amplifies music for the entire room. In the Japan Pavilion, artist Yuko Mohri connects everyday objects—such as umbrellas, pots and pans, rotting fruit—to each other with plastic tubes that carry water. The water drips down, occasionally making sounds like when it hits a cymbal or a metal bucket. It has the sense of a Rube Goldberg machine, but it’s much more elegant, and nothing is collapsing. The objects are not succumbing to the weight of the others, instead they are beautifully co-existing in cacophony and creating a portrait of connectivity through chaos.
We found the Croatian Pavilion on our last day, as it wasn’t connected to the rest of the pavilions. Artist Vlatka Horvat asked friends to send her artworks for her pavilion, and she would send collages in return. She also asked the friends to document the trajectory of their artwork, as she asked for it not to be shipped by mail. Instead, it had to be carried by someone who was going to Venice. The passage of the artwork also documented through photographs and notes.
These works really complemented the biennale theme “Foreigners Everywhere.” We are all from somewhere, and have a trajectory to go elsewhere. There might not be a way to make our passages in time palpable or visible, but making art is a start.