The Planetary Garden is a concept coined by French biologist Gilles Clement, referring to the migration and movement of plant species watched over and tended by human “gardeners”. This idea of the planet as a garden brings to mind connotations of both care and control. A useful metaphor for the symbiotic relationship that we (as creatures) have with our surroundings, but also the anthropogenic arrogance which has led to many environmental catastrophes over the last 200 years.
Manifesta 12 “The Planetary Garden – Cultivating Co-existence” takes Clement’s metaphor as a starting point, alongside the 1875 painting “View of Palermo” by Francesco Lojacono which pictures a landscape lush with flora, none of which are indigenous to the area. The city of Palermo has its roots in a diversity of cultures from Ancient Greece to Arab-Norman and many more before, after and in between. The remnants of these past ages are visible in the architecture, food and gardens of the Sicilian capital, and is continually being shaped by migration, counting Tamil, Somali and Nigerian identities as part of its complex anatomy.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that the Mayor of Palermo, whose invitation brought Manifesta to the city, considers Palermo “as a crossroads of multiple flows and exchanges, thanks to which the city has taken form and been enhanced across its history, in a case of fascinating positive contamination.”
At the opening weekend of the festival, it was difficult to extricate my impressions of Manifesta from my experience of the city itself. It is important to note that while the biennial seems to keep to a fairly basic structure (opening weekend, core programme, peripheral exhibitions and events), the work that has been put into understanding the context of the city is only clearly visible (at least for an English speaking audience) in Palermo Atlas, a study conducted by OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), and commissioned by Manifesta. The publication gives an exhaustive analysis of Palermo and it’s European context through stories, photo essays, infographics and critical texts and seems to display a real attempt made by the Manifesta Foundation to create a platform for the people of the city of Palermo, and their hopes that this will contribute to the continuously changing cultural and political life of the city. Unfortunately this only became apparent to me after returning to London and buying a copy of the book. A common discussion I have had with other attendees of the festival was the lack of coherent information on the ground for us art tourists which brings up some interesting questions regarding our expectations of what art should do, and what we expect to gain from viewing it.
Manifesta 12 is split into three sections: The Garden of Flows, Out of Control Room and The City on Stage. Each considers the place Palermo sits in on issues of migration, climate change and the urban life of a city, often overlapping. My own response to the biennial takes form in three strands:
– How do we understand our participation in art festivals such as Manifesta (the experience of the Art Tourist) in relation to the local population, the struggle of non-european migrants and squaring up the idea of the “european dream” against the realities of european policies on migration.
– What role can/do artists and art organisers play in activism? How far do these discussions go beyond the gallery, the lecture or the collection of essays.
– How much of what has been created by the organisers of Manifesta has staying power? What will be left behind come November? And why does this matter?
Manifesta has made extensive use of buildings otherwise left empty, with the result being venues that often distract from the art work itself. My eyes would wander from a video about migration to the fabulously painted frescoes on the ceiling and then out of a window to the expanse of sea and towards the people out there on boats, right now, making the treacherous crossing from North Africa to Europe. This may sound like it should detract from the work, however these distractions helped to orient me as a tourist, preventing white walls from blinding a visitor to the context this art is being shown in.
In Jordi Colomer’s New Palermo Felicissima, an actress takes on the role of a tour guide, leading her clients to various local “attractions” across a part of Palermo’s coast generally neglected by public authorities and tourist guides. She parades through abandoned car parks, football fields, and stumbles up and around a modified fishing boat, repeating the words of Palermitan writer Roberto Alajmo in faltering Italian fed to her through a headset, often admitting her ignorance and asking the travellers or local fishermen to correct and add to the story. Our position is re-framed, who is the guest and who is the host here? And we are forced to admit the limits of our understanding of a place we are inhabit as visitors.
These impressions are perhaps highlighted best in my experience of Taus Makhcheva’s Baida, a video installation at Palazzo Trinacria just along the street from two of the main Palazzos and minutes from the sea. The piece itself was documentation from a performance that took place during the Venice Biennale in 2017, where a group of performers were supposed to appear and disappear, tied to an upturned boat in the waters of the Venice Lagoon. The work in Venice was influenced by the artists conversations with fishermen in Dagestan, and the recurring motif of being lost at sea and never found. It is described in the Manifesta Guide as reflecting ‘on the precarious nature of human life, struggling for survival against overwhelming economic and natural forces’.
We walked into the installation and sat down, watching the upturned boat bobbing on a grey sea, waiting to see the bodies of performers rise and fall with the waves, but instead are greeted by disembodied voices from behind the camera and a line of subtitles at the bottom of the screen. “What are we even doing here? Is this it? I can’t see any performers! Maybe we’ve come across the remains of a real boat capsized… I’m hungry and cold, can we go back? I just want to drink wine in a piazza now. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” (a version of the video is available here) The voices question the validity of the work itself, the journey they have had to make to get there only to be disappointed by the lack of a sign stating clearly that ‘this is art’. No one is there to explain why there are no performers present. The context has shifted, we are now asked to address our own presence as visitors to an art festival, our own movements across continents and the privileges we are accustomed to.
Rather than proposing solutions, many of the artworks commissioned for the biennial seemed to focus on naming issues of representation, attitudes towards migration and other current geopolitical concerns. After all, what artist would claim to be able to fix such complex problems? However there were some projects that did seem to open up lines of enquiry into how we, as citizens of the art world, could use our skills to the advantage of humanitarian causes. By gathering evidence and listening, projecting the voices of those who have historically been marginalised.
Liquid Violence by Forensic Oceanography is placed in a darkened room, screens blinking with data and go pro footage, a huge infographic across one wall. The investigations by Forensic Oceanography detail the fluctuations of border control across the Mediterranean sea from 2011 until now, accumulating accounts from migrants themselves and data available in the public realm. Through what is essentially quite dry information; numbers, directions, routes of various vessels; they piece together and try to make sense of the constantly changing policies of european governments towards migrants and the (now being criminalised) NGOs that are attempting to help them. This information is packaged attractively for an art audience and highlights the human cost of what are essentially imaginary borders, but is fundamentally a practical resource. The work that Forensic Oceanography collates can and is used by activists to lobby for the rights of undocumented migrants and the responsibility of European powers to acknowledge the humanity sequestered within the data.
If we are to think of artworks as a resource – either through the gathering and presentation of research or as ways of disseminating stories then two video works in particular come to mind. Erkan Özgen’s Purple Muslin and Kader Attia’s The Body’s Legacies. The Post-Colonial Body, 2018. Both use a talking head format to advocate for voices rarely heard (or easily passed over) in the daily news cycle and seek to deepen our understanding of the very real after effects of migration, ghettoisation and policing of black and brown bodies. These are discussions which have implications globally, and are happening at this very moment in Palermo, in London, and elsewhere: wherever you are reading this blog post right now.
The sheer volume of video work on display (literally every piece I have mentioned up until now has been video-based) goes some way to showing just how accustomed we are to producing and consuming moving image dense with information. Despite wanting to give my time and energy to every piece, this resulted in a feeling of being overwhelmed, and it would have been helpful to have been able to revisit some of these art works and the stories they told. Masbedo’s Video Mobile is one project that I wish I had been able to give more time to, and may have benefitted from an online presence.
Across many of the projects shown as part of the Garden of Flows section (particularly in Orto Botanico, the Botanical Gardens) much of the work was almost invisible in spite of the ideas proposed. The information available to viewers on site seemed incomplete, such as Michael Wang’s The Drowned World where his plan to plant coniferous vegetation in abandoned industrial space in order to create coal (a process that is said to take roughly 300 million years) invites far more thought than seeing the piece itself (a very underwhelming peek over a wall at some small trees). This leads me to wonder if the ‘real artwork’ could be documentation of research like Lydia Ouhramane’s folders of email correspondence, proposal sketches and plane tickets that accompanied her piece The Third Choir. Leone Contini’s project Foreign Farmers is set in the former colonial section of Orto Botanico. The artist/anthropologist has created a garden of Sicilian ‘hybrid species’, planting seeds collected over a decade of research into the migrating varieties of plant species which have been brought to the area and adopted as part of the agricultural landscape. His ‘cabinet of curiosities’ set in the Gymnasium of the Botanical Gardens goes some way to explaining the relationships between these seeds and stories, however there is no way to know whether Orto Botanico intends to sustain Contini’s garden long-term and I completely missed the historical context of the site my first time visiting the work. Nevertheless, these growing projects are those with the best chance of living beyond the biennial, in particular Wang’s coal-making scheme which will take an extremely long time if the spot of land avoids development for long enough. It is worth acknowledging the effort that goes into sustaining these long-term projects, and events are a useful tool to re-iterate and re-energise public interest (you could take as an example the evolution of Future Farmers Flatbread Society in Oslo). It is also worth mentioning that it is a far simpler task for a group like Forensic Oceanography who are affiliated with an institution (Goldsmiths University) and examining actions of an arguably more urgent nature, to speak to the importance of the work that they are doing. It will be interesting to revisit these literal gardening projects and see if and in what ways they are continuing a year from now.
As this was my first experience of Manifesta I didn’t know what to expect, and in many ways, I’m not sure what I should expect from another iteration of the biennial either (the next is scheduled for Marseille in 2020). There doesn’t appear to be one face of the festival – the public events, main programme, education hub, OMA study and collateral exhibits all exist side by side in the city and yet seem to be kept quite separate (and tricky to navigate). The biennial a tourist buys a ticket for is a different one from the biennial that a nearby school is involved in, and different again for an artist that lives in the city, and again for a local restaurant owner, a city councillor, an un-documented migrant. It takes a fair bit of time and energy (and interest) to piece together the scope of what Manifesta is trying to do in the city, and quite frankly, not everyone has that. Only time will tell if it does have the impact they are hoping for, but at least the questions that rise to the surface have significance and seem to be worth dwelling on.
