New York-based journalist, editor and producer Maurita Cardone returned to her country of birth to review ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, a complex and multi-layered experience in which she also recounts her own experiences as a female Italian native establishing her own identity in the world.
MAKHU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), Kapewe Pukeni [Bridgealligator], 2024. Site-specific installation, 750m2. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Venice is one of the few cities on the European continent to have had an Arabic name since the 1000s: al-Bunduqiyyah. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of La Biennale di Venezia, shares this little-known fact in the essay that opens the brochure of the sixtieth edition of the biennial, ongoing in the lagoon city until November 24th.
Buttafuoco traces back the Arabic word to the meanings of “different”, “half-breed”, “mixture of people”, “foreigner”, thus connecting it to the theme chosen by the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa for the 2024 Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque which translates into Foreigners Everywhere. A choice which, in the same brochure, the curator explains as follows: “The expression Stranieri Ovunque has several meanings. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners — they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner”.
What Pedrosa focuses on, therefore, is not a concept of foreignness limited to the geographical, cultural or ethnic element, but rather something even more pervasive and profound: is foreign the queer artist who does not identify with the gender assigned at birth; is foreign the folk and self-taught artist who finds spaces of expression only at the outskirts of the art system; just as the indigenous artist who is not reflected in the representations of the dominant culture is foreign. Pedrosa mixes these stories of otherness within what he calls the Contemporary Nucleus of the exhibition, which includes some windows on modernist art that the curator calls the Historical Nucleus and which are divided into subsections dedicated to abstractionism, portraits and Italian artists of the diaspora. This broad overview extends between the spaces of the main pavilion of the Giardini, the traditional location of the event, and the spaces of a good half of the Arsenale, a former armoury and shipyard dating back to the 1100s. 
Nil Yalter, Topak Ev,1973. Metal structure, felt, sheepskin, texts, and mixed media, 250 x 300cm. Exile is a hard job, 1983-2024. Video Installation, Variable dimension. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
At the entrance to the main exhibition at the Giardini, I find myself surrounded by video screens that tell stories of immigrants and exiles, installed on a wall of photographic images on which the red-painted letters of the work’s title stand out: Exile is a Hard Job (1977-2024), a phrase that Nil Yalter, Turkish-French artist who pioneered French feminist art and was awarded this year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, borrowed from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. In the centre of the room, another work by the same artist, Topack EV, (1973), is a circular tent that refers to the artist’s experience in the Bektik nomadic community of central Anatolia. Together, the two works are in dialogue, talking about how men and populations move for different reasons and in different ways, bringing with them their image of domestic space, roles and family. The exhibit I am about to see promises to be rich with these images. 
Bertina Lopes, Rais Antica 2 – Una Historia Verdadeira [Ancient Root 2 -A True Story,1972. Mixed media. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
In the next room, I am drawn to Bertina Lopes’s oil and collage on canvas, Rais Antica 2 – Una Historia Verdadeira [Ancient Root 2 -A True Story, (1972), which seems to have been put there to tell us that, moving forward in the exhibition, it will be important to remember where we started, because unless you know where you come from, where your roots are, you won’t know where you are going. The work by Lopes chosen by Pedrosa is a representation of a tribal and almost stereotypical Africa which is archaic in content but at the same time imbued with the contemporary in expression, as is much of the work of this artist originally from Mozambique, who lived in Italy for almost fifty years.
Victor Fotso Nyie, Veglia, 2023. Glazed ceramic and gold, 22 x 60 x 42cm. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Rubem Valentim, Pintura 3, 1966. Oil on canvas, 100 x 73cm. Private Collection. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
In the centre of the room is the work of another African artist who has made Italy his home. Born in Cameroon, ceramicist Victor Fotso Nyie currently lives and works in Faenza, a town whose name is synonymous with ceramics. The artist uses a process that involves three firings, the last of which is done with gold, for his ceramic sculptures that portray figures that mix his biography with Pan-African popular culture and West African spirituality. The works chosen by Pedrosa for this exhibition are portraits of the women of the artist’s family, his two sisters and his mother. And again that mixture of tradition and contemporaneity emerges in the work of the Brazilian Rubem Valentim, here represented in a series of canvases with geometric motifs recalling the cult of the orixás, deities venerated in the Brazilian variants of African religions. A style and theme that emerged, as the label on the wall reminds us, during the artist’s stay in Rome when “Immersed in the experience of being a foreigner, Valentim deepened his quest for a language intertwined with Brazil’s African heritage”.
Fred Kuwornu, We Were here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2024. Video, 45 min. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
The intersections between Africa and Italy enter the contemporary by way of history in the video work by artist, activist and filmmaker Fred Kuwornu, We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2024), which is a concentration on trajectories found elsewhere in the exhibition, telling how starting from the Renaissance, the European version of art history has neglected the contribution of African peoples, focusing on a marginal representation of Blacks in the cultural ecosystem of the Old Continent. Journeying through different European countries, Kuwornu retraces stories showing that African contribution was much deeper than what history has acknowledged. Even the artist’s biography summarises the complexity of the movements of contemporary human beings. Born in Bologna to an Italian mother and a Ghanaian father, Kuwornu today is one of the many Italians, who have chosen to leave Italy to live in New York. A club to which I also belong.
Compared to other European countries, immigration to Italy from other countries, especially from Africa, is a relatively recent phenomenon. For decades, starting from the beginning of the 20th century, people emigrating from the Peninsula in search of work were in much larger numbers than people immigrating to the country. Even today, the yearly number of people who choose to settle in Italy from other countries is roughly equivalent to the number of people leaving the country to look for better opportunities elsewhere. Meanwhile, Italian society, whose demographic composition is beginning to reflect the last decades of immigration, is trying to understand which side to take and how to move from the history of discrimination suffered in places like Northern Europe or the USA to a present in which we are the ones who have the responsibility of welcoming others. Foreigners Everywhere seems to want to remind Italians that the movements of people towards our country have more history than some politicians like to remember and that these “foreigners” have enriched Italian culture.
Welcoming visitors to the main exhibition with works by new Italians or Italians passing through seems to me to be a nice homage that Pedrosa pays to this country of mine which, even if today it is not showing its best hospitality, has a long history of encounters and intersections with other cultures. In contrast to the theme of migration is recognition of Italy’s history of emigration Italians Everywhere, the section that Pedrosa dedicates to the Italian diaspora, interrupting the Contemporary Nucleus inside the Arsenale with a portion of the Historical Nucleus showing Italian artists who lived and worked outside Italy in the first half of the last century. The curator comes from Brazil, which is home to the largest number of Italians outside Italy. Like many in my region, I have relatives among them. Pedrosa knows that with this installation historically he is touching the soul of a country that is part of Europe but once was geographically and historically, part of the Mediterranean.
60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Candido Portinari, Cabeca de Mulato, 1934. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 60cm Colecao Igor Queiroz Barroso, Fortaleza. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Among the Italians who emigrated to Brazil, two farmers left Veneto to go to work on a coffee plantation in the São Paulo region where they raised their son, Candido Portinari, who would go on to paint monumental works for the United Nations Headquarters and to become one of the most influential Brazilian artists. His work is part of the collection of works that make up the portion of the historical nucleus dedicated to portraiture exhibited within the Giardini. Here I am welcomed by around a hundred faces and bodies represented in works which, exhibited in a saloon-style setup, make up a multicultural constellation of a pictorial genre that was long dominated by European art. Here, however, there is no trace of Europe, while there is a lot of Africa and there are many Black and Brown bodies portrayed with compositional elegance, as in The Girl in Red (1945) by Grace Salome Kwami (Ghana), in Young Woman ( 1947) George Pemba (South Africa) or The lotus girl (1955) by Nazek Hamdi (Egypt), and giving expression to the experiments of the modernist era, as in The Last Sound (1964) by Ibrahim El Salahi (Sudan) or as in Portrait of the Artist with a Broken Mirror (1970) by Ahmed Morsi (Egypt).
Uche Okeke, Male Model Standing, 1959. Oil on board, 92.3 × 60.7cm. Collection of G. Hathiramani. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
There is Africa in relation to itself, and not the other, as in the self-portrait of Uche Okeke in which the artist represents himself against a background of Nigerian indigo, a reference to the ancient practice of indigo dyeing and a hope for a new Nigeria. There is also a lot of African diaspora with works, such as those of the Jamaicans Barrington Watson and Osmond Watson, which convey all the richness and aesthetic complexity of the Patwah experience. The gallery feels like a page from an art history book written in the Global South.
Pablo Delano, The Museum of the Old Colony, 2024. Installation, Variable dimensions. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Equally complex is the experience of one of the territories in the world still under colonial power, Puerto Rico, to which is dedicated a thematic focus curated by Pablo Delano who, in the introductory text, explains that the current situation of the Caribbean island is a symbol of that status of being a foreigner in one’s land that characterises the history of colonised territories. Formally an American territory, Puerto Rico is not fully recognised as a state of the United States of America, with profound implications on the lives of its citizens, including access to federal resources, the right to vote, political representation, trade and immigration and emigration policies. Here Delano retraces the history of a political, economic and cultural colonisation that strongly relied on media and propaganda.
Yinka Shonibare, Refugee Astronaut VIII, 2024. Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, net, possessions, astronaut helmet, moon boots and steel baseplate, 194.4 x 94 x 114cm. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
At the entrance to the Arsenale portion of the exhibition, I ran into an astronaut by Yinka Shonibare who, with a net full of waste over his shoulder, looks ready to leave on a journey, perhaps leaving the Earth. Behind him, the neon sign, Stranieri Ovunque, underlines how our definitions of foreigner are in flux and that in the world of tomorrow, our baggage around identity could transform into a baggage of waste. The message comes to me clearly: in the galleries of the Arsenale, I will go through stories of humanity in transformation, in search of new paths and alternatives. A message reinforced as soon as I entered the space dedicated to Marco Scotini’s project, Disobedience archive, a travelling archive of video works focused on the relationship between art and activism and which here presents forty works by artists and collectives, created between 1975 and 2023, divided into two macro sections. Diaspora Activism “deals with transnational migration processes in the context of hegemonic neoliberalism, as a struggle that drives new ways of inhabiting the world and questions the very meaning of citizenship”, writes the curator in the presentation material. The second section, Gender Disobedience, is dedicated to “nomadic subjectivities, conceived as a rupture of heterosexual binarism”. Fluid identities, whether due to migration or transition, that are at the centre of the selection of works, are identities in constant struggle for recognition and, in those struggles partnerships are born and communities are built: the enemy is often common, as are the goals.
Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey, 2008-11. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Transnational migrations, specifically those crossing the Mediterranean, are also at the centre of The Mapping Journey Project by the French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili, a series of eight videos in which the camera frames a map on which a hand draws the tortuous and perilous routes travelled by migrants crossing the Mediterranean, as told by a voice whose face we never see. On as many silkscreen prints, the same routes are represented in the form of constellations, recalling the ancient astrological knowledge that used to guide journeys as well as the mythological beliefs linked to them and inviting the viewer to reinterpret the concept of belonging, in a dimension that goes from national to universal. Outside the Arsenale, overlooking the water of the canal, pointing at the stars are Lauren Halsey’s columns which, mixing the iconography of ancient Egypt with contemporary icons, invite us to a reinterpretation of history and of the representations handed down from it.
Lauren Halsey. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
All this foreignness left me dazed. I stop to catch my breath at the edge of a pool in the ancient arsenal where an iteration of the work by Claire Fontaine which gives the title to the exhibition is installed. The waters reflect and multiply the writings in all languages “Foreigners Everywhere”. I saw many “foreigners” in the exhibition, but the repetition of terms such as “outsider”, “marginalised”, and “underrepresented”, even in the evidence of its good intentions, left me with the sensation of a cumbersome gaze, the gaze that perceives that otherness, the dominant gaze. Who is a foreigner to whom? And why should someone’s identity be defined in relation to someone else’s gaze? The dozens of portraits of the historical nucleus pass before my eyes, juxtaposed, crowded on the walls, almost like in a cabinet of curiosities, arranged by a Euro-centric vision of the world whereby anything different from the Self is still and inexorably perceived as foreign, flattened under a coat of otherness. And yet those works exude all the completeness of an expression that does not need to exist in relation to the other, of an art that does not wait for the gaze of others to recognise itself.
Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere / Stranieri Ovunque (60th International Art Exhibition / 60. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte), 2004-24. Sixty suspended, wall or window, mounted neons, framework, transformers, cables and fittings. Dimensions and colours variable. 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
According to the interpretation offered by Pedrosa, it is not necessary to be elsewhere to feel like a foreigner. I think about it as the Biennale took me to my country, a country in which I haven’t lived for over 13 years, but which I carry with me at every breath. Am I a foreigner here? I feel a bit like one. As I feel foreign on the pages of this magazine. I wonder what my gaze as an Italian expatriate on this Biennial of “foreigners” can give back to the readers of a magazine that supports artists of the African continent, its diaspora and the Global South. I read somewhere that the phrase in the title of the exhibition, borrowed from a work by the Italian-French duo Claire Fontaine, had in turn been borrowed by them from a Turin collective of the same name advocating against xenophobia in the early 2000s. I can almost hear that expression, “stranieri ovunque”, coming from the mouth of one of the invasion-fearing ladies I met in Turin in my first years of university after arriving from Central Italy to study in the northern city, for my classmates I was the “terroncella” (an endearment of the derogatory word “terrone”, used by Northern Italians for the Southerners) and I had to lie about my origins to a landlady who otherwise would not have rented her apartment to me. That was in a Turin where, during an evening joyride with friends we accidentally entered the grounds of a landowner in the countryside, where we were welcomed with a rifle pointed at us. That expression, “foreigners everywhere”, reminds me of that rifle, it reminds me that, for some, what’s foreign is a threat, an aggressor, someone to point a rifle at.
Back in New York, several days later, after digesting the sensorial feast of the Biennale opening, things started to come together. I found out that another hypothesis on the origin of the Arabic name for Venice traces it back to the Arabic word for rifle. The reason, I read, is that some populations of the Arab world in those years purchased from Venice the bullets that were used in the first rudimentary firearms. I then understood that perhaps that very discomfort that I couldn’t let go of was the key to this exhibition. The pointed rifle is, in fact, the other side of the expression “foreigners everywhere” as it is of al-Bunduqiyyah. But who is the rifle pointed at? Who is a foreigner to whom? Compared to whom? I realise that the reference to Italy in the show might have been something more than a thoughtful homage by the curator. I think Pedrosa might have used Italy as an exemplar story (or a cautionary tale?) of an identity that, through emigration, has spread throughout the world, transforming itself in the process, and at the same time was contaminated by other identities through immigration, thus showing how the concept of foreigner is relative. And it is not attributing that relativity that should interest us, rather the notion that, if the idea of foreign is relative, it means that we are all foreigners, that sooner or later we will be, or perhaps we have been.
Identity is transitory, it changes throughout life and history and you will find yourself on different sides of the word foreigner, as have Italians. I believe that what we can take from this exhibition is that identity is also made up of an otherness which nestles in the very heart of identity, not just on the margins. That we are foreigners with respect to the illusion or presumption of a “strong” identity, and that therefore we are all foreigners because we are all variants, we are foreigners to the extent that there is a dominant identity, that there is a norm. The exhibition invites us to enter a universe where this norm does not exist. A world where no one is a stranger. So perhaps this exhibition is not yet another exhibition of identity art but is an exhibition that invites us to imagine a future beyond identity. Identity is the rifle and, to disarm those who take it up, we need to create a world in which what matters are expression (the different artistic languages, from the figurative to the abstract, which the exhibition takes us through) and content (migrations, gender issues, cultural marginality, the removal of indigenous cultures, all phenomena that the exhibition analyses between contemporaneity and history), where identity is nothing more than form.
ART AFRICA Editor-at-Large Maurita Cardone is a journalist, editor and producer working at the intersection of art, ecology and social justice. She worked extensively as a reporter, editor and head of service in Italian publications until she relocated to New York City in 2011. Between 2013 and 2017, she was the managing editor of the online magazine La Voce di New York, before going back to her real passion, freelancing. Her work has appeared in many Italian publications and she regularly contributes to Il Giornale dell’Arte and Artribune. She wrote and produced the award-winning documentary Shadows of Endurance and is currently working on a new film about the wrongly incarcerated artist, Billie Allen.
