Cecilia Alemani, the Art Biennale between dialogue and optimism

(ANSA) - VENICE, APRIL 16 - The echo of the war in Ukraine suspends Cecilia Alemani's joy of seeing the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale take place in the spaces of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini and the Arsenale (April 23 -27 November).

The exhibition, which takes its title from a book of fairy tales for children populated by fantastic beings, "Illatte dei Dreams", by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), was designed and organized in a virtual way given that the pandemic lasted two years it prevented the curator from meeting the artists, from seeing the works, from touching them.

"It is difficult to talk about art - explains Alemani to ANSA -, to mount an exhibition while we are in the midst of a situation as critical as the one that has affected the Ukrainian people, the whole

    There are 1,433 works and objects to be arranged, the result of the work of 213 artists from 58 countries.

   The Italian presence is nourished: 26. Three major thematic areas: "the representation of bodies and their metamorphosis; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the links that intertwine between bodies and the Earth".

"I preferred - he underlines - to resort to the filter of literature, of art history to tell themes that are very topical, such as gender, sexuality, the body, the relationship with technology from a point of view that some may find dreamlike, others intimate" .

"It is a trans-historical exhibition, with a large majority of female artists and which speaks of the post-human, of overcoming the centrality of man in general, and therefore also of man-male", she explains.

Is there still room for optimism?

"In the end, I think it's an optimistic Biennial. It maintains a positive spirit"

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(HANDLE).