I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: You use Surrealism to articulate the 59th edition of the Venice Art Biennale: a transhistorical and intergenerational dialogue between artists. This is not trivial, since it points to the fact that the creative process today is framed not so much in a rational structure but in dreams and the unconscious. In this sense, artists would therefore emphasize their imaginative capacity, intimacy and emotion to respond to the urgencies and dangers of our time. Will the artistic practice of the coming years not be based on the refinement of the concept but on imagination and creative spontaneity? 

CECILIA ALEMANI: I’m always careful not to make big statements about the future. I don’t know what the next big thing will be, and I think what the research for the Biennale, and also the years of the pandemic, has taught me is that artists are struggling right now. I mean, it’s still a very uncertain time for all of us, and I think it will take time to digest this trauma that we have all lived through. But I think what is safe, or at least, in my opinion, to say is that artists are adopting maybe tools that you call imagination. I call it introspection or using languages like the unconscious or the dreams that were very common with the surrealist people, artists, because in a way, we were all isolated for two years, and the only thing we had, in the end, was our bodies and our imagination, and so even the most sort of “political” artists that I’ve both included or looked at, I think in a way they have abandoned a little bit the more declamatory language or documentary language towards a more introspective, or a language based on imagination and the ideas, again, of using your dreams, your unconscious, not as a sort of way of escaping or turning your back on the world, but as a way of reading the world, simply with different tools that are not, again, those of the sort of more political language, but more connected to your body.

II

AA: The five temporary capsules that you have vindicate the work and weight of women in the field of art. We are interested, above all, in your way of working: the construction of a genealogy as an exhibitionary format. Through it you seem to be telling us that both your participation and your proposal are the result of new power relations in the complex of contemporary art, which provoke the possibility of the emergence of the feminine as a subject of history. Is this the defining force of this edition?

CA: I think it’s a process, it’s a convergence of different forces. Of course, the exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, includes a vast majority of women artists. When it came to the historical capsules, I was even more intentional in focusing only on pieces of history that have been sort of forgotten or excluded by mainstream history. At the same time, while I want to celebrate women artists, I want to be careful in saying it is not an exhibition about women artists, because that’s very important, it’s not an exhibition, it’s not Radical Women, which was an amazing exhibition, which was an exhibition about the history of feminism. So this is not. And it is not because I don’t feel that as a curator I can speak on behalf of 213 artists, labelling them in certain ways, so I think the strength, in my opinion, of the show, is that it is a chorality of voices, a plurality of voices, and some artists have been labelled feminist for decades, like Barbara Kruger, other artists would, you know, be disgusted by this label of feminist. They don’t want to be labelled like that. They’re just artists. Other artists might be tired of being compared to men. So my hope is that you just see this show as The Milk of Dreams. And it’s a show that talks about metamorphosis and transformation. Then, if you are good enough, you might notice that they are all, most of them are women, but I think it’s important to say that it is not the point of the show to me. That’s why I’ve been also quiet about it because I don’t want the show to be dismissed, as it has happened, for instance in Italy, by many, because it’s a show with lots of women artists.

AA: We believe that The Milk of Dreams is a propaedeutic with an eye to how much remains to be achieved in the problematic of gender issues. However, if the aim is to imagine a more fluid and interwoven world, would it not be appropriate for the next move to be to bring together different generations of female creators who have been sidelined in the course of history alongside the dominant male voices to shed light on the artistic?

CA: I think it’s for the next curator to do it. Of course, it’s a good point, but I think we are not there yet in Italy. So I think it’s unfortunate. I mean, I live in America, here, of course, you would do it, but I think the Italians I see or the Italian scene in general, culture in general is… there have been one hundred and twenty-five years of history of the Venice Biennale which have been extremely unbalanced. And so you’re not going to fix it like this. It will take time. And so of course, yes, not thinking about genders anymore or polarities, but it’s not so easy. It needs some work. It needs some reckoning and it’s going to be a process.

III

AA: You give female singularity both expression and representation in the public sphere; in other words, you make it possible to share it in the complex of contemporary art. My point is in what sense it could be said that the female audience is not allowed to read its own personal history into the events or the paths of artistic creation that have unfolded since the nineteenth century, for example. This raises the question, on the one hand, of why the female audience will be able to interpret their individual experiences within the framework of your proposal; and, on the other hand, if the aim is to dissolve the male/female dichotomy in the field of contemporary art, what personal history can the non-female audience read in this edition?

CA: I don’t think of… For me, the audience is the audience. It’s not female or male or gender-nonconforming, this doesn’t matter. The key is the whole person, it’s everyone. I can tell you that the reaction I’ve had in these two months since the show has been open has been overly positive from the female constituency. So many people have come to me and said, this has been very important, and meaningful, and they happen to be 90% women. And of course, also men have been very, some of them, have been very moved, but I think at the end, to me, there is also a sort of educational element to it, especially when it comes to the capsules. I was very interested in giving voice and space to artists that have been very important and as important as their male colleagues but have been sort of set aside, and so I hope there is also a very banal learning moment in which anyone can go and learn about the work of Leonor Fini, as one of the most important surrealist artists, as much as her male peers were, and being used, especially for young people, to seeing these names in books of artists because they are not there. And so I think that sort of even basic learning aspect of the exhibition, the educational aspect, is hopefully a helpful one.

IV

AA: Earlier we asked you about the new power relations in the contemporary art complex. Let’s focus now on the Venice Art Biennale. It frames artistic practices and gives them meaning and value and, consequently, establishes a system of relationships between the different actors involved in the contemporary art sphere. In what sense do you think the institution turns back on itself to question norms, legitimizations and canonical customs driven by the dominance of the white European male in the history of art?

CA: I think what is vital for every institution of the 21st century is to be open and flexible, to interrogate yourself, your mission, your history. And it’s the sign that an institution is healthy and alive if it has the energy, even of looking back and saying: oh!, you know what, maybe we made mistakes in the past, we told very specific stories, we didn’t realize we were excluding others. And of course, my show also excludes many people because I couldn’t include every single voice I wanted, but I think this exercise of looking back and trying to learn also from your own history is an exercise that most institutions are doing right now, from MoMA to the museum in Sao Paolo. Looking back, and of course, from traditional museums, you do it to scrutinize what you collected and what you didn’t collect. Of course, the Venice Biennale is not a collecting institution, so you do it by looking at what you showed and what you didn’t show and so, this should be done with a positive attitude. It’s amazing that we, as humans can do this and can learn from our own past as a way of feeding the future. So I think it’s a very important moment of reckoning for all cultural institutions.

AA: If so, what changes operate within the institution in such a way as to defuse the recurrent criticism that proposals such as The Milk of Dreams receive: in other words, about them being merely an act of justice or even political correctness?

CA: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I go to exhibitions to learn and to learn something that I didn’t know before. If I always see the same thing, I’m just not learning anything, so I get bored. And I think even those that think it’s just an exercise in political correctness… I don’t know what it means, but I’m just regurgitating what you just said. I think just first go and see the show and then… for me, what drives me crazy is just labelling things without talking about them. So labelling an exhibition as politically correct without giving me one example, I say what does it mean? I don’t know what it means, I really don’t know. Does it mean that I have lots of women? Is that politically correct? I don’t think it’s politically correct. So I think it’s about really engaging in the conversation, even if the conversation is uncomfortable for people, and I notice that a lot because I’m Italian, but I live in America, so nobody in America would ever say it’s politically correct. In Italy, they would just dismiss it by saying: oh!, it’s, whatever, proper, politically correct. But they don’t engage in the conversation because it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s uncomfortable to admit that most Italian exhibitions are male-driven and most European exhibitions are male-driven, so they don’t want to talk about that. So it’s easy to just say: oh!, it’s trendy.

V

AA: Some people publicly state that you prioritize the political or ideological in such a way that it swallows up the artistic dimension of your proposal.

CA: Yeah. I don’t know what it means that I prioritize the political, to be honest. I think it’s a very physical exhibition, a very visceral and tactile exhibition. There is no, zero, conceptual statement or political statement. I mean, there are a lot of political statements, but not a statement. I think they come through the artwork. So I would not, I do not agree with the fact that I don’t prioritize the artistic dimension of the show. I’m sorry, but I really don’t think so.

AA: We wonder if the oldest and perhaps most important event on the art circuit is an arbiter of taste thanks to The Milk of Dreams, or if the metamorphosis of bodies and the different definitions of the human reformulate beauty. We would like you to reflect on these issues to conclude our conversation. It was a pleasure to discuss topics related to your curatorial project for the Venice Biennale.

CA: I think in a way it is, even though it’s not a choice, but it is one of the most important exhibitions in the world, and so, also talking about taste in 2022, it’s hard of course because it’s a very broad term, but I think the Biennale as an institution has the opportunity of being a platform for the most contemporary tendencies in art. Again, I don’t know if it’s about taste or beauty because those are always very complicated concepts to address in a show, but it has a role, it has a leading role in that, sure.

CECILIA ALEMANI is the curator of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Since 2011 she has also been the director and chief curator of High Line Art, the public art programme of the High Line in New York.

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