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Biennale Gherdëina

Ignota, Memory Garden, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo.jpg
Alexander Burenkov

Sharing Umwelt and experimenting with decentering at Biennale Gherdëina ∞

А pilgrim in tie-dye clothes with a hiking stick hewn from a tree branch in her hand led me off into the forests of San Cristina in the mountainous Val Gardena valley, narrating the journey with a dizzying mixture of anecdotes, poetic observations of nature, stories on ecological sensitivity, and tales of the local flora and fauna. Every so often, we would halt under the oak trees and drink flower soup. Later I was told to lay on hay in a picturesque yurt woven from hand-dyed fabrics that had been subjected to eco-printing techniques. The meditative babble of a nearby stream and exposure to natural energies precipitated a semantic and sensorial fever dream that opened up to inner transformation. This was no run-of-the-mill hiking exercise. It was a multi-sensory hallucinogenic trip turned immersive spectacle, threaded — and choreographed —  along the crisscross mountain paths of a region that has been renowned as an as an ethnopharmacologicall hotspot since prehistoric times, where a combination of uniquely rich local fauna and scarce human intrusion have fostered a robust local knowledge economy for centuries. Shared experience and communal awareness of living in the world-of-many-worlds that encompasses a broad spectrum of intersections and inextricable entanglements with all living species — this was the sort of stuff whispered among attendants at this year’s Biennale Gherdëina ∞.

 

Opening Biennale Gherdëina ∞, 2022. View of Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Barbara Gamper, Somatic encounters - earthly matter(s). You Mountain, You River, You Tree, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (3)
Barbara Gamper, Somatic encounters - earthly matter(s). You Mountain, You River, You Tree, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (2)
Barbara Gamper, Somatic encounters - earthly matter(s). You Mountain, You River, You Tree, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo

Barbara Gamper, Somatic encounters - earthly matter(s).

You Mountain, You River, You Tree, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

The surrounding scenery is the impressive forest biotope of the South Tyrol, with its unique biodiversity, surprising in terms of how stunning an effect a slightly mediated observation of the currents and rhythms of natural life can have on you, and providing ample demonstration that animals and plants have a world too. Plants definitely sense and respond to a world which they experience, a world of their own making—and so, furthermore, we find confirmation here that there is a “they” out there to do the sensing and responding, a subject rather than an object, a kind of self, however abstruse and unlike our own it may be. Plants encounter, access, influence, and are influenced by the world on their own terms and in their own fashion. Most of these experiences and responses are and will always be unknowable to us; but hearing — a capacity we share — makes them thinkable. Suddenly, from being part of the background, plants leap into action once again, present and alert. The guide accompanying me on this two-hour walk-based project through the alternative reality of the forest kingdom of Val Gardena is one of the cohort of performers acting out the SENTIERO script, penned by the artist, poet, gardener, and choreographer Alex Cecchetti. Referring to his projects as incantations, turn play, poetry, and collaborations with more-than-human beings that act as catalysts for near-mystical experiences of the everyday, Cecchetti designs sensory experiences of blurred engagements with food, smells, sounds, and colour, all of which are derived from the artist’s deep engagement with local communities and ecologies. 

 

 

 

Alex Cecchetti, SENTIERO, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

The same methodology and focus on cross-species and cross-kind collaboration between all living and non-living creatures and assemblages of the human, animal, vegetal, mineral, mycological beings that inhabit the Alpine valleys, mountains, and skies of Ladinia was shared by many works at Biennale Gherdëina ∞ curated by Filipa Ramos and Lucia Pietroiusti and titled Persones Persons. Barbara Gamper’s poetic work furnishes one of these: her somatic encounters / earthly matter(s). You Mountain, You River, You Tree took viewers on a hike across the landscape of Vallunga, inviting them to discover and reconnect with the history of the territory through a process of learning and awareness wherein one’s own body is taken as the departure point from which to reach a wider consciousness of the fact that to exist is to be in relation. No wonder the public programme of the Biennale almost entirely consisted of various forms of collective meditation sessions. Their main role, however, was not to recreate lost connections with self, physicality, and spirit, but rather to build a bridge with other, non-human species. 

While Ignota’s Memory Garden, drawn from mnemotechnics and associated with the lunar cycle, was conceived as a ritual space for healing in the shape of a circle activated by group meditation by the fire next to the medieval castle tower, Hylozoic/Desires' performance for four wind instruments, two voices, and a conductor — under the title an omniscience: an atmos-etheric, transnational, interplanetary cosmist bird opera spanning seven continents and the many verses — invited viewers to kit themselves out with binoculars and go birdwatching, with an insistence on collectivity, social movements, and non-linear ways of being. The galactic scale of fluid energies and substances and the transcendent fluidity of objects and subjects flowing one into another were the themes taken up by Angelo Plessas, who held his Meditation of All Beings on the Biennale opening, comprising a form of breathing techniques ceremonial (ending with the drinking of an elixir) and establishing unique relationships with the Earth and Cosmos based on interconnectedness and interdependence. 

 

Memory Garden Ritual, performance by Ignota. Opening of Biennale Gherdëina ∞, 21.05.2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (2)
Memory Garden Ritual, performance by Ignota. Opening of Biennale Gherdëina ∞, 21.05.2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Hylozoic Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), an omniscience, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (2)
Hylozoic Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), an omniscience, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (3)
Hylozoic Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), an omniscience, 2022. Performance at Vallunga, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo

1-2 Ignota, Memory Garden Ritual, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

3-4 Hylozoic Desires [Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser], an omniscience, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

Meditative mechanisms are likewise embedded into such physical art works as Eduardo Navarro’s Spathiphyllum Auris, a large-scale sculpture of a peace lily erected in the Vallunga valley that the artist envisages not merely as a spot for visitors to rest and a device for collecting rainwater for the birds to drink but also as an absurd tool for contemplation which provokes everyone into casting off their preconceptions of what they are observing.  

 

 

Eduardo Navarro, Spathiphyllum Auris, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

 

Other works at the Biennale opt to not scream out about this same idea of sharing a non-flat and non-singular world with others, but rather whisper it softly — whether it be this year’s Venice Biennale main project star artist Britta Marakatt-Labba’s applications and embroideries depicting the peculiar sensibilities of the Sámi people, or the Karrabing Film Collective's surprising endeavour of having their new video The Family and the Zombie frame the struggle for indigenous rights in Australia’s Northern Territory as a Trecartin-esque satire on a group of future ancestors living in the aftermath of the current ecological crisis. 

 

 

Karrabing Film Collective, The Family and the Zombie, 2021. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

Many worlds — lively, noisy worlds — exist; and many don’t include us at all. Experiments in worldbuilding through the polyphony of artistic voices prompt attempts at decentering ourselves and the human experience — skills at which we must become adept in order to live better and more responsibly in a more-than-human world. This decentering, an admission that the human race is not the only game in town, in no way corresponds to any reduction of our world. Rather, much as occurs when we extend the virtue of intelligence to other beings, the addition of plant worlds to our own enriches both. Even those worlds in which we don’t participate add to the totality of sensations and experiences which form the living, teeming Earth on which we too live and depend. The very existence of other worlds, of numerous overlapping worlds in which many kinds of things and many ways of seeing and being are possible, is something that should thrill us.  

Other worlds are not only possible, they are already present. The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves and emerging with a more meaningful and compassionate cosmology. 

After a six-year-long reboot of the biennial heralded by Czech curator Adam Budak and focused on strategies of worldbuilding rooted in folk and ancestral knowledge, the latest edition still retains its focus on exploring the historical and geographical site-specificity of the region. This is vividly manifested in Chiara Camoni’s Sister, a disquieting sacred-idol-like sculpture made with materials from the Val Gardena, including white Dolomite dust, minerals from Vallunga, and ashes from the pines found between Ortisei and Selva. But its ambition obviously strains towards much loftier goals, transcending the locality by moving onto the universal planetary level through its tackling of bioethics, more-than-human subjecthood, and existence beyond human intelligence. 

 

 

Chiara Camoni, Sister, 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

 

It is only when we realise the true extent and scope of non-human life on its own terms, and accept its reality and value beyond our own, that we can even begin to seriously adapt our own ways of living. Ultimately, the biennial’s focus is placed not on granting the non-human personhood, but on acknowledging and valuing their animalhood — and their planthood, their subjecthood, their beinghood. Such an approach means allowing them to be themselves, while working with them to structure the world for the benefit of us all. Based on this, we must think not on the scale of the white cube, laboratories, or a city, but on the scale of forests, mountain ranges, the tundra, oceans, and whole continents. Even while referring to the prehistoric and oceanic past of the Dolomites and colouring the water of the Ortisei Castle’s fountain blue in their Paleness, the duo Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen discuss global capitalism and present a critique of Big Pharma by tracing the twists of fate of the horseshoe crab [Limulus polyphemus]. Though this creature predates the dinosaurs and has survived ice ages, four mass extinctions, and a major meteorite impact, it was nevertheless added recently to the IUCN’s Threatened Species list, all because of the massive extraction of the species from its natural habitat to exploit its striking blue blood, rich in copper, as a biosensor to individuate bacteria and develop vaccines.

Forming the main location of the biennial’s venues (Sala Trenkel, Hotel Ladinia, and Castel Gardena) is the city of Ortisei. One of the oldest towns in the Val Gardena, Ortisei is home to a ski resort — the ultimate in tourist destinations, hosting over a million visitors during the summer months. Being aware of its setting, Biennale Gherdëina brings another perspective on this region and the opportunity to propose something more than yet another pursuit of an exotic geographic location, which has become one of the mainstays of and points of accusation levelled at the contemporary biennial movement, echoing with claims of deliberate adoption of a colonial approach to discovering exotic and pristine places on the planet that have not yet been brought to heel by the global art market. 

The Biennale also follows the ancient and future memories of pathways forged by people, animals, plants, narratives, and matter across systems of migration, seasonal movement, and transhumance in the region, resonating with its landscapes by creating a new wave of migration of art lovers hither. Curators seem particularly inspired by the seasonal herding practices of the Val Gardena, which see people, cattle, and all the accoutrements they carry iterating millennial systems of displacement between the fresh pastures of the mountains in the summer and the more protected lowland areas of the valley in the winter.

Since its emergence as a Manifesta 7 collateral event in 2008, held for the first time in Italy [to be more precise, in Trentino and Alto Adige], 

the Biennial found its strong identity in its rurality and in escaping not only from the urban environment but from the anthropocentric mindset so out-dated for “the era of living creatures” — an age which demands we re-centre our way of seeing reality to embrace all of nature: from the air we breathe to plants, water, snow, animals and, of course, human beings. 

 

In Ortisei, a city inhabited predominantly by the Ladins, a people belonging to the Romansh ethnic group, where Italians proper make up only 5 % of all residents and Germans 11 %, the ultimate international approach of cultural translation is embedded right in the core of the exhibition, where it is communicated simultaneously in four languages. On discovering the folklore and traditions of the local peoples, a fascinating journey to an exotic fairy-tale valley becomes a transformative experience in an alternative narrative about animals and plants. Here, we listen to legends and stories not only about them, but also on their behalf, trying their subjectivity and Umwelt on for size. 

As the artist and writer James Bridle suggested in his recently published fascinating book Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, our acknowledging the existence of non-human worlds, and subsequently the existence of a shared world, is something that helps us navigate the twin hazards we face in thinking about the beyond-human world: anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. The former is the danger of thinking ourselves to be at the centre of everything; the latter is the danger that, in trying to access non-human experience, we simply mould it into a poor shadow of our own. The act of fully recognising that non-human plants, animals, and others have their own worlds which are fundamentally different and unknowable to us is to begin to end human exceptionalism and human supremacism. Humans do not stand at the centre of the universe. 

By stepping aside we can start to imagine what a world in which we are not the most important thing might actually look like, and consider the richness of non-human worlds on their own terms. 

An artist list that features only 24 participants and the inclusion in the exhibition of previously existing works (in this case from the Museión collection in Bolzano, where a small exhibition is also open to the public under the aegis of the Biennale) are two good examples of an economy of gesture that is highly relevant for sustainable and environmentally friendly curating, and adequate for the post-pandemic world engulfed by noise and ecocide. The joyful poetry of minimalism reigns here, represented specifically in the form of two playful paintings by Etel Adnan which, as Simone Fattal said (whose works are exhibited beside Adnan’s), “exude energy and give energy… shield you like talismans… they help you live your everyday life.” Despite having recently passed away, Adnan still remains an incredibly powerful and compassionate voice on what it is to exist on this Earth, as a human as well as more-than-human being. The poetics of understatement and moderation, elevated by the current incarnation of the Biennale to the absolute, combined with an ever-oozing love of life and sympathy for all living things, leaves much room for fantasy — be it the legendary Kingdom of Fanes, which extended in archaic times around the Fànis range in the Dolomites, or new ways of seeing and appreciating the more-than-human world.

 

 

Biennale Gherdëina ∞

 

 

Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro

 

 


 

Alexander Burenkov is a curator, cultural producer and writer based in Lisbon. He is a head of the Curatorial Practices course at the Moscow School of Contemporary Art. With focus on overlap between infrastructure, technologies, ecology, and sound practices, investigating environmental transformations and their impact on societal structures and cultural production, Burenkov’s curatorial work spans experimental exhibition formats and alternative modes of education, intermediality, ecocriticism, environmental humanities and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics.

He held positions of Curator of the V-A-C Foundation (2014−2016), Chief Curator of the ISSMAG Gallery (2016-2017), Senior Curator of the Regional Development Directorate of ROSIZO-NCCA (2017−2018), Curator of the Khodynka Municipal Gallery (2019), Curator of Cosmoscow foundation for the support of contemporary art (2019-2020), Artistic Director and Chief curator of Ayarkut foundation (2021-2022). His writing was published at Artforum, Kommersant Art, Russian Art Focus, Esp, Aroundart, Colta, Artguide, Afisha, Art Magazine, The Calvert Journal, East East, Dialogue of Arts, Afisha, Strelka magazine etc. Resident curator at AIR351.

 

 

 

 

 

Ana Vaz and Nuno da Luz, Wolves howling - In choir - Evening snow, 2022. Exhibition view at Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Angelo Plessas, The Hand of the Noosphere, 2022. View at Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Angelo Plessas, The Meditation of All Beings, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal_Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (2)
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (3)
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (4)
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (6)
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Jimmie Durham_Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Martina Kyriaki Goni and Giles Round_Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, 2022. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Giles Round, Il mostro, 2022. View at Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo (2)
Giles Round, Il mostro, 2022. View at Hotel Ladinia, Ortisei. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Bruno Walpoth, Pinocchio, 2022. View at Castel Gardena, Selva Gardena. Commissioned by Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo

Exhibition views, Biennale Gherdëina 2022. Photography: Tiberio Sorvillo

 

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