Venice Biennale 2024 | Foreigners Everywhere | Spanish Pavilion | Sandra Gamarra Heshiki | Giardini

I. Virgin Land

The European colonization of the Americas and other territories produced a violent way of inhabiting the earth. Far from the alleged objective of maintaining human life, the purpose of colonial inhabitation was the commercial exploitation of land, which destroyed the possibility of a world that included a non-European one.

Tierra Virgen shows a series of landscape paintings that belong to different Spanish museums and reference the current Spanish territory as well as the former colonies of Latin America, the Philippines, and North Africa. Each painting summarizes different temporalities, from the past to the present and vice versa, even pointing to a certain futurity in search of a sustainability urgent for our contemporary inhabitation.

II. Cabinet of Extinction

The scientific expeditions that supplied the objects for cabinets of curiosities that later became part of most museum collections were systematic and organized endeavors that provided information for the commercial exploitation of human and nonhuman resources. Over the centuries, they became part of this scheme, strengthening the development of colonial trade routes and the promotion of mass tourism.

The Cabinet of Extinction reveals the relationship between historical colonialism and present-day extractivism by showing the “treasures” of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European botanical expeditions along with their ecological and economic repercussions. The paintings on display are related to the colonial manner of taxonomizing “the natural,” questioning the relationship between nature and human beings as part of the same system of survival.

III. Miscegenation Masks

Colonial inhabitation and its intrinsic pictorial representation are bound as much to the project of miscegenation as they are to the whitening of the population or the imposition of gender binarism. The bodies of men were massacred and the bodies of Indigenous women raped, with nonbinary sexualities eradicated altogether; sexual dissidence was accused by the Church of being sinful, while science claimed it spread disease.

Miscegenation Masks delves into the colonial practices of portraiture as a factory of representation that inculcates the social prostheses of the body of the royalty, aristocracy, and oligarchic society upon which their sovereignty is constructed and negotiated, taking into account that portraits are conceived as time capsules that seek to immortalize political and social norms.

IV. Cabinet of Enlightened Racism

The ethnographic museum has equated the concept of Western culture with civilization when considering the Western project the most developed and thus the lens through which to view all other cultures. Processes of classification and modernity have generated coloniality and harbored the seeds of racism, sadly echoed by political forms of fascism in contemporary times. In this sense, anthropology and science have always been perversely utilized as tools of racial discrimination.

In this cabinet, racism—as its very title makes explicit—is perpetuated since the Enlightenment, passing through modernity until arriving to the present, but at the same time—if we pay attention to its double meaning in Spanish—leaving an illustrated trace, drawn and represented for posterity.

V. Migrant Garden

The open space Migrant Garden proposes a counter-narrative to the historical museum: a garden inhabited by painted copies of monuments that are not in Spain but form part of the historical patrimony of the ex-colonies, it suggests a new model of institutionality that breaks with perpetual coloniality in favour of a diverse museum.

VENICE, 20.04 - 24.11 2024