Manifesta 12 – The Planetary Garden, Cultivating Coexistence

Paola, Italy
(15:23, 19th June)
A 9 hour intercity train trip from Palermo to Naples is delayed. The train had skirted the coastline for most of the journey, making the crossing between Sicily and mainland Italy by driving directly onto a ferry. Once across and heading north the track improves and the train speeds up, until it reaches Paola, and has now been sitting stationary for 3 hours with little information given. Police investigating an incident involving a person on the tracks between x & y station. But the air-conditioning is kept on, people are free to sit inside or smoke on the platform, even exit the station. The toilet situation is little sketchy, as they empty directly onto tracks, and in the warm early evening the smell of piss and worse starts to rise. But updated estimated departure times are given, water bottles are handed out, then packets of biscuits, juice boxes and those salted Italian cracker things that go well with beer. No one is asked for documents and apologies are given in both Italian and English. Passengers huff and scroll through their phones but the inconvenience is minor with some perspective.

9 days earlier a rescue ship containing 629 migrants was turned away from Italian ports, left stranded at sea by the decision of the Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, until 2 days later Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave instruction for Spain to offer a safe port to the people on board the vessel. This despite the protest of a number of Southern Italian mayors who defy his anti-immigration stance and offer to assist without funding or approval.

Palermo’s Mayor Leoluca Orlando is one of these voices “We have always welcomed rescue boats and vessels who saved lives at sea. We will not stop now”. Orlando’s influence and involvement in Palermo hosting Manifesta 2018 is felt, his words open the programme and his response to the keynote address calls for peace, solidarity, respect for diversity, gender equality and the environment as well as mobility as a human right. Welcoming migrants who arrive as citizens of Palermo, if only as a symbolic action, is shocking but heartening to hear a politician say in 2018.

On arriving in Falcone-Borsellino airport, the Italian border officer did not look up when I passed him my passport. Behind the glass booth I could see that he along with a second colleague were fixed to a phone streaming a football match. A ‘friendly’ I assumed given Italys failure to qualify for the Fifa World Cup, about to commence in Russia. I passed over the border with the overt reminder of capitalism and corruption’s influence over the movement of individuals. On my Ryanair flight largely occupied by art world types I would see sporting Manifesta Preview lanyards in the following days. These lanyards and tote bags acting as passports further highlight our privilege as tourists, temporarily navigating the city armed with matching programmes and smart phones.

Poitras’s video installation highlighting the growing presence of the American Military bases throughout Sicily, largely operating drone strikes on North Africa and the Middle East. Poitras’s film uses ariel footage of Sigonella base captured by blazingly taking their (camera) drone above the site seemingly abandoned on a bank holiday.

 

John Gerrard,Untitled (near Parndorf, Austria), 2018
Photo via. Manifesta.org

A computer simulation of the section of motorway in Austria where an abandoned truck was found in 2015, containing the bodies of 71 migrants. The text accompanying the work describes the artist journeying to the site to document the empty road and police markings, locating it via news images. This process speaks more of action and empathy than the cold and detached computer simulation of this site of mass atrocity.

Peng! Collective, Become an Escape Agent! (Help a refugee cross borders), 2015

Peng! Collective’s video installation works from the point of privilege of EU citizens as mobile citizens but offers a way to use that privilege for good through a network in which those with the freedom of mobility can offer to smuggle asylum seekers across the border as they return from their holidays. Cleverly pitched to a tourist audience in a biennale context this work hits home in suggesting real action an individual can offer to the migration crisis.

It’s only early June but the southern Italian heat is already powerful and oppressive. I slowly move from one abandoned building… to a church… to a garden, welcoming each venue an opportunity to retreat from the midday sun. As a first-time visitor to this city the ‘cross-fertilisation’ of cultures the Mayor speaks of is strongly felt. Historically the city has been shaped by Ancient Greek, Arabic, Norman and Christian powers. Whilst presently the market places are filled with Asian, African and European traders alongside the zucchini, melanzana and limone symbolic of Sicily’s rich agriculture if somewhat poor economy. Geographically Palermo is the bridge between the Mediterranean and Europe and Manifesta 12 uses this unique location to host a number of projects that predict optimistically the possible humanitarian, cultural and environmental benefits of increased movement and less borders.

Leone Conti, Foreign Farmers, 2018

Foreign Farmers, a collaborative project between artist Leone Contini and various migrant communities across Italy, is an experimental vegetable garden in the former colonial section of Palermo’s Botanical Gardens. Its a simple premise where varieties of veg from different communities grow alongside one another, but the experimental garden and its structure is a suitably grass roots intervention in the Orto Botanico.

Cooking sections, What is above is what is below, 2018

A section of the project, What is above is what is below, uses an architectural structure to passively cool three citrus trees and enable them to bear fruit in the heat of the Sicilian summer. Effectively ‘watering with stones’ the structure provides a cool and reflective place to recover from the heat of the day, which makes slightly more palatable 10euro drought-resistant picnic lunch of lentils I just forked out for from the upmarket cafe down the road.

Uriel Orlow, Wishing Trees, 2018

Wishing Trees is a video installation by Uriel Orlow that traces three Sicilian trees, each of which hold significance in the history of the island.

A cypress tree located near Palermo that was planted by the first black saint of the Catholic Church, St. Benedict; a towering Moreton Bay fig in central Palermo that continues to grow outside the former residence of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone and his wife Francesca Morvillo, both assassinated in 1992 and an Olive tree in the village of Cassibile beneath which the WWII armistice was signed.

A highlight of the installation is a detailed interview with Simona Mafai, an activist for womens and workers rights, as well as strong voice against domestic violence and the mafia. The document she helped produce and circulate ‘Nine inconvenient tips for the citizen who wants to fight the mafia’ is an affirmation of the impacts an individual can have against oppressive systems of power.

The ‘nomadic’ is a problematic term in the arts. It conjures the romantic view of an artist as someone unfixed to geographical (or seemingly financial) restraints, able to hot-foot around the globe seeking inspiration in that which is foreign and unfamiliar. Manifesta 18 does go to some length to counter this with many projects having local community contributions or at least ongoing consultation between the invited artist and place. However Palermo feels like a city on the cusp of gentrification and I felt acutely aware of how cultural tourism plays into the historic divide between private and public, evident not only in the Italian art world but also economically and in urban infrastructure. The Mafia may be on its way to being driven out but are we inadvertently replicating the poverty and positions of capital power with our centrally located Airbnb?

Nora Turanto, I’m happy to own my implicit biases (malo mrkva, malo batina), 2018
Photo via. Manifesta.org

In the small but impressively ornate baroque interior of Oraotrio di San Lorenzo a stark black mental frame, referencing both a cella and a locker room, provides seating for the audience as well as a structure on which Turanto impressively climbs in spiked stilettos. Her performance, somewhere between spoken word and a cappella, was a 20 minute recited stream of consciousness weaving from clickbait references to self advice regarding anxiety and FOMO.

Matilde Cassani,Tutto, 2018

Four unique velvet drapes adored the baroque facades of the Quattor Canti, a busy traffic and pedestrian intersection leading from the old quartier into the high street of Palermo. Each drape features an embroidered figure, like a Hindu god, holding a palm frond and an arancini ball. On Saturday the 16th of June the streets were blocked by police and a large crowd gathered in the sun to wait for the ‘all-day pyrotechnical show’ which turned out to be a bouts of coloured confetti blasted into the air and eventually to be strewn across the city centre, to be found for days to come in back alley ways, empty pockets and at the bottom of tote bags.

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