Biennale Arte kicks off, Buttafuoco speaks: “We are a garden of peace, thanks to Meloni and Giuli”

“The risk is stopping at the finger and losing the moon”

“There is an image that accompanies me these days: the finger pointing to the moon. It is an ancient image, even overused, a cliché, but it becomes necessary again. Because the risk, once again, is always to stop at the finger: at controversies, at belongings, at pressures, at individual cases. And, in all of this, losing the moon. And it is that moon that really concerns us: the world as it is, the world in its tragic truth, never more than in this time. It is the condition of global war. History knocks on the doors of the daily lives of all of us; imagine if it does not knock on the solid doors of the 130 years of history of the La Biennale di Venezia Foundation”, said Buttafuoco in his speech. “We have had complicated weeks; I would like to say complicated days, or rather complicated hours, complicated moments”, he specified.

“If there is something that amazes me, it is that this whole world that derives from the French Revolution, from ecumenism, from secularism, from the desire to find the perfect formula for democracy, has turned upside down into its exact opposite: in a laboratory of intolerance, of requests for censorship, closure and exclusion – continued Buttafuoco – There has been talk of who should be there and who should not. Of who represents what and what guilt they carry with them. And there are real tragedies, there are wars in progress, there are civilians who die much more than they did when we thought we had closed the massacres, tragedies and abominations in the pages of history. And we don’t want to admit it. We are not blind to what happens outside of here territories”.

Thanks to Meloni and Giuli

“I thank Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni” – Buttafuoco said – who “confirmed that flamboyant freedom which is the autonomy and audacity of the Biennale”. “Thanks to the Ministry of Culture in the person of Minister Alessandro Giuli and to all the local institutions that support the initiatives of the Biennale”.