Greenhouse: Pavilhão de Portugal/ Representação Oficial Portuguesa na 60ª Exposição Internacional de Arte de Veneza — La Biennale di Venezia 2024
Greenhouse: A Rehearsal
Transcending the hermeticism of the exhibition space and the sacredness of the artwork, Portugal's participation at the 60th Venice Biennale, taking place between April and November, is redefined by a Creole garden housing a living archive, a school, and assemblies. A transdisciplinary conception, the GREENHOUSE project is born from a collaboration between Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, and Vânia Gala's, bringing different areas of artistic knowledge together. Rooted in the principles of transversality and radical solidarity, and in a collective formed by a visual artist, a researcher, and a choreographer, Portugal's representation obliterates hierarchies—between curator and artist, nature and culture, thought and practice—and points towards what can be imagined as an artistic proposal for the future.
Anchored in transdisciplinarity, the project's structure conflates practice, theory, pedagogy, and experimentation into actions that engage with the Creole garden within the main hall of the Palazzo Franchetti. Based on principles of permaculture and syntropic farming, and inhabited by botanical species alluding to tropical flora, the garden takes on the form of both sculpture and installation, accommodating within itself the actions that make up the project. GREENHOUSE is thus activated through encounter and sharing, metaphorically revisiting what poet and writer Édouard Glissant termed the "Creole garden." This concept serves a dual function in his thought: referring to vegetable gardens clandestinely cultivated by enslaved people as a means of subsistence, featuring a diversity of plants that mutually protected one another; and representing a space of cultural diversity, interconnection, and dialogue that is crucial to the creation of Creole identity.
In GREENHOUSE, the Creole garden becomes a key space for bringing ideas, actions, and presences together—starting with the Living Archive. This initiative explores movement, sound, and action through a permanent sound installation, composed from a piece created by the three artist-curators and from radio transmissions from The Funambulist project (a research platform dedicated to space and body politics via podcasts and print publications). Likewise, it features the performance Passa Folhas, a "choreographic living archive" created by Vânia Gala in collaboration and exchange with other artists. This performance explores the idea of the garden's underground roots, which intertwine, mix, and support one another as a way to consider the body movements on stage; and also explores the "upside-down" position, establishing relationships with Kalunga cosmology and its ancestral world images.
A school will also be part of this proposal to question the epistemological construction of the exhibition space. Based on activist historian Sónia Vaz Borges' thinking and inspired by the experiences of militant education carried out by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) between 1963 and 1972 [1], a programme of educational actions and workshops will take place in the Creole garden. As structures maintained in areas "liberated" by the party, militant schools developed programmes committed to the anti-colonial struggle based on three pillars: political training, technical training, and the transformation of individual and collective behaviours. Bringing these ideas to the Biennale means rethinking art as a space for learning and knowledge, devising programmes that prioritise access for communities marginalised by normative education systems, such as Afro-diasporic communities, migrant and refugee populations, and individuals with visual and hearing impairments. Four different parts mark this aspect of GREENHOUSE: Walking Archives, Silent Speaking, Futuristic Schools, and Grounded Soil.
For the first part, snippets of stories and memories of freedom fighters will be recounted in a reading-performance where Apolo de Carvalho, Juliana da Penha, and Sónia Vaz Borges will stroll through the garden amidst imagery and objects from their personal archives, creating a space that becomes public through sharing and conversation. Silent Speaking, the second action, focuses on militant education in dialogue with marginalised forms of communication in a workshop-debate conducted in sign language, with materials in braille. Futuristic Schools, a seminar led by Sónia Vaz Borges and Virgílio Varela, proposes a reflection on the future of education based on three pillars: militant education, Afrofuturism as a cultural aesthetic, and the Dragon Dreaming methodology, inspired by Australian Aboriginal culture. The final initiative housed in this school built by GREENHOUSE includes a workshop-performance in collaboration with Aderbal Ashogun and a lecture-debate with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, both aimed at contemplating the relationship between liberation struggles and land rights.
The activation programme is complemented by gatherings which take place amidst the plants, sculpture-flowerbeds, and vertical gardens growing and nurturing this ever-changing space. Named after various garden morphologies, Rizomas, Bolbo, Pólen, Biomas, and Quintais invite artists, writers, curators from other pavilions, researchers, and the general public to create intersections and networks for research and reflection, engaging in discussions ranging from music and spoken word as poetic tools of resistance and liberation to the role of curator-artists and collectives from the "Global South" and Afro-diasporic communities in creating mutual support networks.
In GREENHOUSE, the garden proves to be a counterpoint to the creation of individual genius; pedagogy presents itself as an artistic practice; collective creation becomes an alternative to individual production; political discourse intersects with aesthetic thought; the exhibition space is simultaneously expanded and recreated; and the separation between creators and the public dissolves, among other dogmatic notions that are overcome, thereby revealing their own obsolescence. There is undeniable merit not only in the propositions put forward by the project but also in its selection to represent Portuguese artistic production at one of the most prominent events in the international artistic field.
This participation "showcases … the country we are today, with all its richness and diversity," as stated by former Minister of Culture Pedro Adão e Silva to the media; nonetheless, it also engages in a compelling dialogue with the central theme of this year's edition, deploying the attention-grabbing slogan "Foreigners Everywhere" to announce its (very contemporary) concern with ever-increasing migration flows and state policies legislating on borders and bodies. Ultimately, a critical analysis remains necessary to unveil what lies beneath the surface in the relationship between a project of this magnitude and the material reality wherein the Venice Biennale unfolds.
Foreigners Everywhere!
"Without all these writers, any return to the 'Homeland' would necessarily lack any landmarks, any support, even those scattered fireflies that guide the enduring hope of lost travellers in blue nights." [2]
When Jean Barnabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant wrote Éloge de la Créolité, in a close dialogical relationship to the ideas of Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and other decolonial theorists, they considered Art as the primordial moment, the preamble, of Creole identity affirmation [3]. In this manifesto-book, published by Gallimard in 1989, the authors delve into the development of Antillean literature, pointing out parallels with the formation of the Martinican people following French colonisation, which thereby took on a certain otherness as a defining trait. Manifested through a sort of "filter" of exteriority, this otherness is revealed in Antillean writing (or in its pre-literature, as termed in the book) through the mimicry of French writing (the literature of the metropolis), a fact decried by the authors as the "terrible condition … of perceiving one's inner architecture, one's world, the moments of one's days, one's own values, through the gaze of the Other." [4]
In Éloge de la Créolité, the profound poetics of writing reveal an ability to illustrate the mechanisms through which colonisation extends beyond political and economic domination of colonised peoples, at once establishing a relationship of cultural domination and creating "foreigners to their own consciousness," "deported from themselves." Overcoming this dichotomy, breaking free from mimetic expression, finding oneself, and affirming an identity are endeavours achievable through artistic expression buoyed by those who came before, who rehearsed an instance of Antillean literature, albeit permeated with exteriority—the "scattered fireflies" guiding a "enduring hope." Although the manifesto holds undeniable validity for understanding different historical processes experienced by other colonised peoples, it is important to emphasise that the authors' propositions sought not to claim a "universalism of difference" but rather to specifically investigate the creation of Creole identity. The Other, as the antithesis of the universal subject, is a colonial construction—therefore, creating a "universalism of difference" would essentially perpetuate the same dominating logic.
In the book, Jean Barnabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant affirm the principle of giving in to the multiplicities that constitute Creole identity, much like "the Creole garden gives in to the forms of the yams that inhabit it." [5] GREENHOUSE seems to draw from the same powerful image: that of roots building vital underground networks of mutual aid and protection. With the myriad agents that bring the project to life, by branching out into different facets of artistic work, and through the lively challenge it poses to the milieu's epistemologies, it appears to rehearse [6] new futures based on a practice engaged in rethinking existing means of knowledge production, reproduction, and valorisation. In the not-so-bluish night of contemporaneity, these propositions are themselves "scattered fireflies."
Author's note
"Any decolonial exercise entails envisioning alternative forms of exhibition and representation; it involves engaging in exercises in speculative fiction. Refraining from such an exercise implies accepting the immutability of the world. Fostering emancipatory utopias within the tradition of those historically subjugated allows for taking action and accomplishing what everyone believes to be impossible." [7]
However, attaining to the futures illuminated by these fireflies is a task that extends far beyond any interior endeavour. In addition to the significance of what political scientist Françoise Vergès terms "emancipatory utopias," we come across an entire horizon of structures that require dismantling—and naming them is a possible starting point for this protracted process. In a passage from her latest book, A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum, Vergès describes how certain discourses, perpetuated even by cultural institutions, consign anti-colonial groups and aspirations to the past, thereby masking ongoing colonisations and the emergence of truly decolonial processes. The fallacy within this argument becomes readily apparent when we consider, for instance, the Venice Biennale.
Aligning with contemporary decolonial aspirations, this edition opens a crucial space to projects whose disruptive force would have rendered them unimaginable not so long ago—and GREENHOUSE is one such example. In that aspect, this project is joined by others within the Brazilian representation, including the indigenous artist Glicéria Tupinambá, curated by Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, with the renaming of the pavilion to Hãhãwpuá Pavilion, and Spain's participation with Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra. It is paradoxical, however, that the same institution has publicly disregarded a letter signed by over 20,000 cultural workers [8] for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion due to current contingencies and the ongoing process accusing the country of genocide against the Palestinian people. Despite the occupation of Palestine being arguably the most blatant instance of ongoing colonisation in the present day, the slogans echoing in the Biennale's statements seem to lack broader resonance.
Decolonising the past is evidently easier than decolonising the present; and despite our desire to establish contemporary art as the territory of decolonial discourse, a false universalism prevails within certain cultural institutions (including the Venice Biennale), disrupting such hopes. This universalism adeptly conceals its complicity with racial capitalism underneath flowery discourses and empty rhetoric, rendering it almost invisible—or so inconspicuous that we are unsure of how to confront it, as Françoise Vergès highlights. But, little by little, in opposition to these mechanisms, we learn to distinguish true fireflies from lanterns which, deep in the darkness, obscure our vision.
Paula Ferreira is a writer, photographer and independent researcher. Born in São Paulo, she currently lives in Lisbon. She has a postgraduate degree in Photography from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and in Aesthetics from FCSH NOVA. She is the founder of Aos cuidados, a project that encompasses printed publications, exhibitions and workshops within themes related to access to health and rights to care, always from a feminist, intersectional and transdisciplinary perspective. In 2023, she curated the exhibition Bandeira Branca, at Galeria Irmã Feia, and the film cycle Escrever a Liberdade, at Museu do Aljube. She is assistant curator at Anozero: Bienal de Coimbra, 2024 edition.
Translation PT-EN: Diogo Montenegro
Images: Mónica de Miranda, Routes to the roots, 2024, inkjet print on cotton paper, 100x66 cm; Creole Garden, 2024, inkjet print on cotton paper, 120x80 cm; Greenhouse, 2024, inkjet print on cotton paper, 100x66 cm; Crossing, 2024, inkjet print on cotton paper, 60x40 cm. All images: © Mónica de Miranda. Courtesy of the artist.
Notes:
[1] "The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74," VAZ BORGES, Sónia; available on
[2] L’éloge De La Créolité: Para Uma Tradução Crioula, DA SILVA BEIRA, Dyhorrani, p. 106; available on
[3] Ibid., p. 117.
[4] Ibid., p. 103.
[5] Ibid., p. 116.
[6] In A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum, Françoise Vergès refers to the term "rehearsal" based on a quote from Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean's Abolition Revolution: "The programme of absolute disorder is a programme of 'life rehearsals,' … of practices that embody the idea of freedom through joy, revolutionary love, and solidarity, without which overcoming the divisions fuelled by racism becomes impossible."
[7] Decolonizar o museu: Programa de desordem absoluta, VERGER, Françoise, p. 52.
[8] I am here referring to the ART NOT GENOCIDE ALLIANCE initiative.