Venice is one of the mythical places of the collective imagination. Indeed, behind the invisible cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan, one might suspect Venice is hidden. It is evident in Zaira, Isidora or Eusapia, where fragments flash of that labyrinthine city where every wrong turn leads to the discovery of wonders. In fact, the whole book is a fable of the reflections of its waters, the splendour of its palaces, the infinite nostalgia its memory awakens and, above all, of a place to experience that “cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears.”
Behind its overwhelming beauty lies an even more singular trait: its condition as a “city-world.” For centuries, Venice has been a place of circulation for people, goods, ideas and languages, fostering contact between different universes. Perhaps that is why it seems so fitting that an institution devoted to periodically producing a collective imago mundi was born there.
The first International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice arose in the context of that fervour for world's fairs that swept through cities such as London and Paris. Opened to the public on 30 April 1895, it received 224,000 visitors, presenting itself as a great mechanism for comparing the artistic excellence of countries every two years. This feature soon turned it into an international showcase of great value, where different visions of the world converge.
For that very reason, it soon ceased to be simply an art exhibition. In the 1930s Music, Cinema and Theatre were added; in 1980 the International Architecture Exhibition was born, and in 1999 that of Dance. This is not a mere accumulation of disciplines. What is interesting is that its boundaries are increasingly permeable. Proof of this was Rem Koolhaas's Monditalia (2014), which brought together in the Arsenale an exhibition that could well be considered a meta-biennale, thereby reinforcing its condition as a creative laboratory.
Indeed, the architecture biennials offer good examples of this. They have moved from displaying buildings and projects to interrogating their political, social and urban dimensions. Paolo Portoghesi opened the Corderie dell'Arsenale to the public, turning that space — until then abandoned — into the setting for an international discussion on architecture. Decades later Lesley Lokko developed this intention even further, envisioning The Laboratory of the Future.
Here the fundamental question arises: what does it really mean for a biennial to be a laboratory? Bruno Latour wrote: «Give me a laboratory and I will move the world.» This is not merely a metaphor, since the laboratory is the place where a hypothesis can be tested, but also where new hypotheses can be proposed. From this perspective, art and culture cease to be solely spaces of representation and become places to experiment with social relations, ways of living together and possible futures.
That explains much of the Biennale's recent transformations. The latest editions have progressively shifted the boundaries of specific fields of knowledge and have more decisively incorporated issues such as the climate crisis, decolonization, diversity, care, migration and new ways of inhabiting space. I would therefore highlight two features of this process: the will to orient proposals from positive ethical values, and the evolution of disciplinary boundaries, with the aim of turning creative projects into social laboratories. The Biennale thus appears as an exercise of imagination oriented toward responding to urgent challenges.
Several national pavilions in recent biennials allow us to observe this clearly. Indeed, the peaceful competition among nations, originally based on presenting artists and works representative of each country, has increasingly given way to pavilions that function as spaces for interrogating identities, histories and conflicts.
From there one might even derive the question of the continued validity of the nation-state–based model. However, this should not imply that the Biennale be understood as a neutral container. The latest edition has made this clear: the participation of Russia, Israel and the United States has sparked controversies of different kinds, with the protest against the Israeli presence culminating in a strike by numerous national pavilions during part of the day.
On the other hand, communicating vessels have always existed between the city and the Biennale, including places that hold works purchased by the Venice City Council during the early biennials. Moreover, each year one need only look at the programmes offered by the other cultural institutions to see how most of them correspond to what the Biennale is thinking about. The exhibition thus extends throughout the whole city and, in doing so, turns the city itself into subject matter for the project.
This is evident today: the Art Biennale occupies the Giardini, the Arsenale and numerous locations in Venice and its surroundings, while the Theatre, Dance and Music festivals activate other spaces, extending more decisively into Mestre and Marghera. It can therefore be said that the Biennale does not simply take place in Venice: it takes place with Venice.
And here the paradox appears. The Biennale is part of a much larger cultural ecosystem, made up of museums, foundations, galleries, international institutions, private collections, parallel events and new uses for historic buildings. That system brings resources, activity and international visibility to a city whose heritage would be difficult to maintain with public funds alone. However, it is also part of a dynamic that is progressively turning it into cultural merchandise.
Tourism, real-estate investment and the proliferation of spaces aimed at visitors generate wealth, but also pressure on housing, services and daily life. Artistic projects such as Ciutat de vacances (2017–2019) have analysed how Venice constitutes a paradigmatic case of mass tourism and its effects: the conversion of places into tourist products and the loss of community and intimacy.
While preparing the opening of this project at the Palazzo Grimani, I heard a phrase that seems like one of the best unintentional definitions of its contemporary condition: an American tourist asked the vaporetto's controllore: “What time does Venice close?” The question prompts a smile, but it also reveals a disquieting metamorphosis: Venice as a place that is visited, consumed and ultimately abandoned. In Se Venezia muore (2014), Salvatore Settis puts it more severely: Venice is a “thinking machine,” a tool for imagining the idea of the city and, precisely for that reason, a symptom and a laboratory of the fate of historic cities.
Perhaps that is the Biennale's true challenge. If Venice is a place where the future of culture is tested, it should also be a place to think about what kind of cultural cities we want in the future. Because a culture capable of conceiving new worlds cannot disregard the place where it projects them.
Venice runs the risk of becoming a magnificent cultural amusement park — sophisticated and perfectly preserved, but without daily life. For that reason, the Biennale's condition as a laboratory should also serve to experiment with other forms of relationship between culture, economy, tourism, heritage and citizenship.
The city that for centuries connected East and West can continue to connect present and future. To do so, it is essential that Venice not cease to be a city.
NEXT IN Summit is the event promoted by ACCIONA Cultura that brings together international leaders in the cultural field to share experiences, discuss ideas and analyze the challenges that will shape the future of the cultural industry.