Close Portraits

Piero Chiara
Mostra organizzata dal Comune di Orta

AA.VV.
Punto e Linea

Mordechai Omer
National Council for Culture and Art

Franca Ghitti
Grafo

Luca Patella
Sargentini publisher

Gherardo Frassa
Edizioni Nuages

AA.VV.
Art for the world

AA.VV.
[Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores]

In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish pavilion, told a reporter that the Biennale "takes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new... but by now it is an obsolete structure." Muntadas's On Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, "I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense--how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor... by the media, of course, by context and by history." Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the Biennale's Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and "translations" it has undergone over time, and investigating Venice's status and the space that frames the Biennale. Muntadas notes, for instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussolini's orders was replaced again after the war.

Sergio Pautasso
Edizioni Pananti

Sandro Chia
De Luca Edizioni d'Arte

Richard Gorman
Toppan Printing Co.

Mariateresa Chirico
Eventi & Progetti Editore