Great blog by Dr Stephen Pritchard about the Venice Biennale. read the full post here http://colouringinculture.org/blog/ourboat
“Barca Nostra” was installed at the Arsenale for this year’s Venice Art Biennale a few days ago. The work of Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel, “Barca Nostra” has attracted immense media attention, with most of the media blindly parroting the official press release unquestioningly.
“Barca Nostra” is a boat: a fishing boat on which more than 800 migrants died in 2015 when the vessel sank in the Mediterranean. “Barca Nostra” has been variously described as “a relic of a human tragedy but also a monument to contemporary migration, a symbol of the (im)possibility of freedom of movement”; “a vehicle of significant socio-political, ethical, and historical importance”; “The Ship of Commons” that is a “Monument to Tragedy” and “a relic of a human tragedy”; and a “Migrant Death Ship”!
The shipwreck was the grave of hundreds and hundreds of people trying to flee their countries for a better life in the EU. It now is now an art object on display at the world’s most prestigious art festival, forming part of the Biennale’s headline exhibition. The exhibition is called (without any hint of irony) “May You Live In Interesting Times”.
For the Venice Biennale, these “interesting times” seem to focus on standing and gawping at a cleaned-up shipwreck on which more than 800 innocent children, women and men died! How very “interesting”!
In these “interesting times” it is clearly ok for the world’s top art event to be sponsored by Japan Tobacco International – one of the world’s largest cigarette manufacturers! But, hey, this is “art” – contemporary art of the sort where literally anything goes. The art of the spectacle and the simulation. A sinister postmodern world in which “Migrant Death Ships” have immense pulling power and incredible PR value. By exhibiting the boat at the Venice Biennale also, of course, creates increased cultural and economic value for this newly appropriated art object.
To see the art world fawn over a shipwreck that was a grave to so many people is utterly abhorrent.
The total cost of salvaging the boat, maintaining and restoring it (it has been restored) is somewhere in the region of €33 million. God knows how much it cost to transport it to Venice!