Biennale Arte, on the 6th morning, an action open to all to give visibility to artists from indigenous peoples colonized by Moscow

The ‘indigenous peoples’ performance, scheduled between the entrance to the Gardens and the Lagoon, a “symbolic passage from closure to opening”, where participants “will present their work, works, images, testimonies and names connected to personal stories and identities and to their communities”, is also directly related to the theme of this year’s exhibition ‘In Minor Keys’. The protagonists of this event have in fact been “historically relegated to a minor position, politically marginalized, culturally suffocated, and excluded from the dominant narrative. ‘Minor’ therefore describes the condition of peoples whose voices and lives have been systematically belittled, silenced or exploited”.

“The participants in the initiative will become ‘living pavilions’. They will give life to an exhibition without walls. Coming out of the shadow of the Russian pavilion – whose inauguration for professionals is scheduled a few hours later, that same day at 5pm, according to the Biennale programme, ed. – they will move towards the lagoon. “The action links imperial war and internal repression, including marginalized voices in a direct public dialogue”, explain the organizers of the event in a statement – Arts Against Aggression, Memorial Italia, League of Free Nations – born from an idea and commitment of Katia Margolis, an artist born in Moscow but long based in Venice. The protagonists are “artists of colonized ethnic groups, within the borders of the Russian Federation – which are almost 200, for a total of 26 million people, whose cultural and political presence remains largely absent from both the public space and the institutional framework in the country”.

“In the context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, the action – which takes place in the context of protests for Russia’s return to the Art Biennale, after the invited artists had decided not to participate in 2022 and the Pavilion was offered by Moscow to Bolivia in 2024 in fear of dissenting actions – underlines the continuity between external military aggression and internal colonial practices, including repression, forced assimilation and systematic silencing of indigenous voices, or their appropriation”. Appropriation also demonstrated by the project “The Tree is Rooted in the Sky” presented by Moscow for this Exhibition based on “a continuous show, with a vast representation of artists, including a Buryat woman who lives in Kensk, in Yakutia”, as the former Minister of Culture and Special Representative of the Russian President for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail, had anticipated, citing the inclusion of an artist from Kensk as the sign of an inclusion which in fact is only formal. Shvydkoj.

The repressive context of indigenous communities, the organizers of the initiative also recall, was explicitly recognized by a resolution of the European Parliament of February 2024 and by a text of the same year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

The performance will begin with a symbolic gesture: the artists will emerge from a closed and ‘shadowed’ space behind the Russian Pavilion, marked by the temporary writing “Тюрьма народов / GULAG of the people” which evokes stories of repression, genocide, and erasure. Participants will meet between the entrance to the Gardens and the Lagoon “to bring and present their works, images, testimonies, and names that speak of personal stories and the identity of their communities. Works not exhibited within institutional structures but shown and therefore activated in a public space”. This is how each of the participants becomes a ‘living Pavilion’, embodying a culture and presenting works, acting as non-existent national institutions. “Together they will form a provisional and distributed exhibition, a public configuration of bodies, voices and works.”

The performance will come to life through the simultaneous presence of works of art and names and testimonies spoken in multiple languages, “transforming visibility into an act of memory and recognition of a vast multicultural reality that remains largely absent from the attention of international audiences and artistic institutions due to a long history of imperial expansion, political centralism, cultural repression, forced Russification, mass deportations, ethnic-based persecution, genocidal violence, mobilizations and forced recruitment in the ongoing war in Ukrainians to other forms of systematic discrimination”.