Venice Biennale, sold-out open day for the new headquarters of the Historical Archive

Among the most anticipated moments, the debut of “Body as Archive”, a Biennale Danza project conceived by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor and developed with Aisoma, an innovative choreographic tool powered by machine learning. On stage were the young dancers of the Biennale Danza College, protagonists of a performance that showed how artificial intelligence can become a creative partner capable of generating new possibilities of movement and interpretation of the body. A real baptism for what some have already defined as the first “dance trained” by artificial intelligence to debut in the context of the Biennale. An experiment that looks to the future without giving up the human dimension of artistic creation.

The Archive was also transformed into a meeting space between languages ​​and disciplines with “Watermarks”, a performance conceived and performed by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Kamaal Malak, among the artists of the 2026 Biennale Arte. A work that evoked the theme of traces, migrations and memories sedimented over time, in a continuous dialogue between body, image and sound. closing the performance journey was “We Were Together, I Forget the Rest”, a stage action of the Biennale Teatro curated by Willem Dafoe. Built from materials kept in the Historical Archive, the performance transformed documents, testimonies and fragments of memory into a poetic reflection on memory and oblivion. And this time it was the protagonists who surprised us. After Dafoe’s introduction, the readers were the employees of the Biennale, each reading documents from the different artistic sectors: Cesare Bisantis (Cinema), Michela Campagnolo (Dance), Giacinta Dalla Pietà (Historical Archive), Helga Greggio (Architecture), Davide Ferrante (Music), Luigi Ricciari (Visual Arts), Marta Zannoner (Theatre).