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Viktor Misiano: The Roma Pavilion questions the concept of national representation of the Venice Biennale
What in fact I think seems very important, especially in view of the history of the Venice Biennale is for instance, how it represented Palestinian artists as a nation with their own pavilion, even though we know they don’t exist as a nation, even though they want to have their own state, they fight to have one…
What is very strange is that this collective body, Gypsies, Roma people don’t demand or claim a state of their own, or to be represented as their very own nation, and this questions the whole concept of national representation on which the Venice Biennale has been based, since the Belle Époque and the end of the 19th century…
It also reveals this other fundamental contradiction of the present day because for the past 15 years ‘they’ have been convincing us that we are living in the era of globalization and how nation states as such are now disappearing but in reality the Venice Biennale has been glorifying them up until now, so what I want to say is that despite all the appeals of globalization, in fact until now all contemporary art infrastructures have continued to be purely national – all the museums, all the Kunsthalle, all galleries… the only cultural, or one of the few cultural and communication organizations which can be considered ‘transnational’ is George Soros’ Open Society.
Everyone knows that the Venice Biennale was founded, up to now, on the principle of National Representation – so I think this pavilion is strange and important – from many points of view even crucial to the history of the Venice Biennale – as we also know Roma people, ‘Gypsies’, consider themselves one nation, one ‘race’, belonging to one tradition but are citizens of different countries, their work represents different nations, they have many problems communicating between themselves, because not all of them speak their original language anymore, they don’t all speak English yet, but they speak their own civic languages: Serbo-Croat, Rumanian, French, English…
Reprinted with permission from Artefacta, the section on the Roma Pavilion.
