A Punch Thrown With Eight Fingers
Adilson De Oliveira
3 June 2026
The Ecuadorian Pavilion did not feel like something I simply visited. It felt less like something I viewed and more like something detonated inside me afterwards — a kind of emotional firecracker lodged beneath the ribs, continuing to go off long after leaving Venice. Not an exhibition organised around explanation, but around accumulation: memory, weather, grief, tenderness, politics, laughter, exhaustion, ritual. And somewhere beneath it all lingered the faint shape of that absurd Gonzo fist with two thumbs — excessive, improbable, somehow emotionally exact. Tawna & Oscar understood something increasingly rare within the Biennale itself: that art does not always need to announce itself loudly to alter the emotional architecture of a person.
Video still from Llaki (2026), Tawana Collective. Image courtesy of Suzette Bell-Roberts.
I realised this halfway through Llaki, when I stopped trying to “understand” the film and instead found myself listening to it the way one listens to rain hitting different surfaces at night — zinc roofing, leaves, distant water, skin. The work does not unfold according to the rigid architecture Western cinema usually demands from Indigenous narratives. There is no anthropological handrail guiding the viewer safely toward moral clarity. Tawna trusts opacity. More importantly, they trust relation. That trust is what gives the work its emotional force.
For years, critics writing on video art — from Rosalind Krauss to Gene Youngblood — returned to the idea that moving image fundamentally altered perception. Not simply because it introduced duration into art, but because it dissolved certainty. Video could leak. It could tremble. It could behave like consciousness itself: fragmented, unstable, recursive. The best video art never feels “shown.” It feels overheard.
That is precisely what Tawna achieves. Llaki feels overheard from another structure of living altogether. Desire in the film is not isolated from territory, spirituality, labour, ancestry, or communal memory. It circulates through them. The work’s engagement with queer and Warmipangui experience in the Ecuadorian Amazon becomes moving precisely because it refuses the Western tendency to flatten sexuality into identity alone. Here, affection behaves
more like atmosphere than category.
And somewhere in that atmosphere, I began thinking about Guillermo Gómez-Peña — particularly the way he understood the body as a borderland permanently interrupted by history. More specifically, around his earliest art troupe, ‘Poyesis Genética’, and how Tawna rhymes so magnificently with it. Gómez-Peña’s greatest works carried a productive instability: ritual collapsing into satire, language collapsing into performance, performance collapsing into political wound. Tawna shares that instability, though stripped entirely of irony. Their films are gentler than Gómez- Peña’s work, but perhaps more devastating because of it.
Tawana Collective and Oscar Santillán. Image courtesy of Suzette Bell-Roberts.
And unlike so much contemporary moving-image work still trapped beneath the cathedral lighting of post-Bill Viola aesthetics — where spirituality arrives pre- softened for museum consumption — Tawna’s films behave differently. They do not “immerse” the viewer. They accumulate inside them. Slowly. Like humidity trapped in old walls. Like smoke inside fabric after a fire. The images in Llaki do not perform transcendence; they sediment. They settle into the nervous system and remain there, difficult to fully rinse out.
The emotional register reminded me less of cinema and more of oral history. Not oral history as archive — oral history as weather system.
The distinction matters. Archives freeze experience into evidence. Weather moves through bodies. It arrives unevenly. It changes pressure without warning. It saturates one person while passing lightly over another. The voices, textures, silences, and rhythms inside the pavilion behaved exactly like that — not fixed narratives to be decoded, but emotional climates drifting between generations. At times, Llaki felt humid with grief.
At others, electrically tense, as though memory itself were gathering in the air before a storm.
That is what made the moving-image work so profound. Tawna understands that trauma is rarely inherited through direct storytelling alone. It survives
atmospherically. In gestures. In the tone of a father’s silence. In the way certain men sit at a table without ever fully relaxing their shoulders. In songs sung too loudly after midnight. In the uneasy laughter following violence. The films carry that same atmospheric transmission. Rather than presenting history as chronology, they allow memory to circulate like pressure moving across terrain.
Even grief in the work refuses singular ownership. In Kawashima, where clay vessels become sites of passage between birth, death, and dreaming, mourning behaves collectively, almost meteorologically. The projections spilling across the Llanchamakara textile felt less like images being displayed than weather patterns briefly touching fabric before disappearing again. One leaves the pavilion not with conclusions but with residue — as though the works have settled lightly onto the skin and continue to develop there hours later.
What struck me most in Llaki, however, was a brief sequence that arrives almost quietly — grainy military-training footage carrying the texture of old Super 8 or battered B-cam reportage. Young men running drills. Bodies learning obedience. Masculinity being manufactured through repetition. Then suddenly, the sequence ruptures: a young man lifts his rifle and fires directly into the sky. The sound punctures the room. Not metaphorically — physically. It tears through the softness and spiritual density of the film like a crack splitting glass.
Video still from Kawashima (2026). Image courtesy of Suzette Bell-Roberts.
That single gesture altered the emotional temperature of the pavilion for me. The footage hit me harder than almost anything else in Venice this year because it collapsed the geographical distance I had unconsciously placed between the Amazon and Southern Africa. Suddenly, I was no longer only thinking about Ecuador. I was thinking about the men who raised me in Johannesburg — men deformed by the psychic machinery of the South African Border Wars, by conscription, by militarised whiteness, by a state that fed fear into boys until fear became posture, silence, alcoholism, rage. My own father was blind and escaped the draft through circumstance rather than ideology. Luck spared him from becoming another body swallowed by that apparatus. Others were not so fortunate. Many returned physically intact yet emotionally unrecoverable, like houses still standing after a fire, but
permanently carrying the smell of smoke inside the walls.
What Tawna achieves in that moment is extraordinary because the footage never collapses into easy equivalence or sentimental universality. Instead, it reveals militarisation itself as a contagious colonial language — one that reproduces loneliness, rupture, and obedience across vastly different territories. Gómez-Peña once described borders as “portable wounds,” and that phrase kept echoing through the sequence. The young men in Llaki are separated by oceans from the South African men I grew up around, yet the emotional residue feels terrifyingly familiar: the vacant stare after indoctrination, the confusion of tenderness inside patriarchal violence, the way nationalism teaches boys to amputate parts of themselves in exchange for belonging.
The subtitles deepen that ache rather than resolving it. They drift through the film like inherited thought fragments carrying grief between generations. And perhaps that is why the rifle shot lingers in the body long after the scene ends. It does not function as cinematic climax. It functions as memory returning without warning. A sonic wound reopening itself across continents.
What stayed with me most overall was the pavilion’s understanding of slowness. Not aesthetic slowness — institutional slowness has become its own dead genre by now — but emotional slowness. The kind that allows meaning to gather gradually instead of arriving pre-packaged. So much contemporary art today resembles a thesis abstract expanded into architecture. You grasp its conclusion within seconds and spend the remaining twenty minutes confirming it. The Ecuadorian Pavilion resisted that deadening efficiency completely.
Óscar Santillán Crisálida, 2025. Image courtesy of Suzette Bell-Roberts.
The exhibition asked something far more difficult of its audience: patience. And patience, increasingly, feels political.
Especially inside Venice, where the Biennale often encourages a strange form of cultural speed-reading — viewers drifting from pavilion to pavilion collecting impressions the way tourists collect postcards. But Tawna & Oscar interrupted that rhythm. The works seemed uninterested in immediate legibility. They lingered instead at the edge of translation, where sensation arrives before explanation. Then came the opening itself — mezcal and rum instead of the usual Venetian prosecco diplomacy — and somehow that mattered too. It shifted the emotional register of the pavilion immediately. No brittle performative refinement. No nervous flute-glass politeness. Just people getting properly warm, loud, alive. It felt honest. The soldiers and working men I grew up around in Johannesburg never sat around delicately sipping prosecco beneath soft institutional lighting. They drank hard. They laughed too loudly. They carried damage openly. There was something profoundly refreshing about an opening that understood conviviality not as networking etiquette but as collective release. A reminder that joy, intoxication, grief, solidarity, and chaos have always lived beside one another politically. Sometimes the most human response to a collapsing world is not restraint but raucousness — to get slightly fucked up together and survive the evening with your tenderness still intact.
Óscar Santillán, Antimundo, 2025. Image courtesy of Andrea Rossett.
Meanwhile, Oscar Santillán arrives almost like the cherry on an impossibly lush cake — not necessary for the pavilion to function, yet somehow completing its emotional texture perfectly. His sculptures carry a quiet, sensual intelligence. In Voyager, a discarded rainforest shirt repaired with meteorite fragments becomes a tiny act of cosmic tenderness. And works like Placenta, with their stripped computer motherboards resembling geological landscapes, gently remind us that every machine contains buried earth inside it: minerals, labour, extraction, memory. Santillán never overwhelms the pavilion. He sweetens it — subtly, precisely, leaving a strange aftertaste of wonder long after you leave. I could not care less for the
paintings, admittedly, but perhaps that hardly mattered here. The sculptures had already done the heavy lifting.
And perhaps that is why the pavilion worked so powerfully overall: it understood proportion. The entire thing felt like a great punch-up boxing match — lean, disciplined, emotionally charged, no wasted movement. Technically, two artists, though Tawna’s presence complicates that idea beautifully. Tawna — a seven-member anti-colonial collective of Sápara, Kichwa, and Mestizo artists and filmmakers from the Ecuadorian Amazon — moved through the pavilion less like multiple authors and more like a single clenched fist. Which suddenly made that ridiculous Hunter S. Thompson image feel strangely perfect again: not a Gonzo fist with two thumbs, but one with eight fingers. Too many limbs. Too much force.
Excessive, improbable, somehow emotionally exact. And still, somehow, it lands like
a curb-stomp to the jaw.
Video still from Llaki (2026), Tawana Collective. Image courtesy of Andrea Rossett.
No bloated curatorial overreach. No need for Goldilocks institutional balancing acts trying desperately to make everything “just right” for everybody. It already was just right. Tight. Compact. Open to the public for free. A pavilion confident enough to simply drive art straight down the throat without apologising for its density, politics, tenderness, or complexity. In a Biennale increasingly addicted to excess, the Ecuadorian Pavilion understood something older and far more difficult: restraint sharpens impact.
By the time I left, I no longer felt I had “seen” an exhibition.
I felt I had spent time inside a different arrangement of attention, where nobody felt they should have the right to be the centre.
Adilson De Oliviera joins the ART AFRICA team as a guest writer while taking up a long-term fellowship with the ART AFRICA Foundation. Working closely with Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts, he focuses on developing new outlets for critical art writing and helping to develop young voices within ART AFRICA’s Programme.
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used media such as drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
