An early model of “Dovecote,” a brief, practically wordless movie directed by Marco Perego for exhibition on the Biennale, has a scene that tracks a person in uniform as he drives a motorboat by means of a morning in Venice. The town is exhibiting off its glories, with palazzos and domed church buildings mirrored within the canals, a blue sky above. The movie shifts to black and white because the motion strikes inside a constructing much less adorned than those the person has boated previous, however grand, even so. It’s his office, the Giudecca ladies’s jail.
Perego mentioned in a phone interview that he wished to distinction “the great thing about Venice, one of the crucial lovely locations on this planet, then this silent place inside.” He added, “I wished to ask the query of what freedom means.”
As soon as contained in the jail, the movie focuses on an unnamed character performed by Perego’s spouse, the actor Zoe Saldaña, who’s to be launched that day. Her companions are performed by 20 precise prisoners.
Through the Biennale, the movie shall be exhibited within the jail’s visitation room, as a part of the Vatican Pavilion, which is being hosted all through the constructing. The present may even characteristic work in varied media by 9 different artists, proven in areas together with the jail’s courtyards, chapel and cafeteria.
The Holy See first participated within the Biennale in 2013, however that is its first yr exhibiting on the jail. Pope Francis is predicted to grow to be the primary pope to go to the Biennale, touching down by helicopter within the jail courtyard on April 28 earlier than heading to the Piazza San Marco to have fun Mass, in line with Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the prefect who leads the Vatican’s division of tradition and training.
In an e mail, Giovanni Russo, the pinnacle of the Division of Penitentiary Administration within the Italian Ministry of Justice, mentioned he was approached to host the Vatican Pavilion by the cardinal, who can also be a poet and essayist. Russo defined, “When the cardinal made this proposal to us, I mentioned to myself, I’d be committing a sin, I’d be violating my duties as a Justice of the Peace, if I didn’t settle for this request instantly.”
With My Eyes is the title of the pavilion, curated by Bruno Racine, the director of Venice’s Palazzo Grassi museum, and Chiara Parisi, the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. “It conveys the message that we mustn’t solely be spectators, but additionally witnesses,” Racine wrote in an e mail. He later elaborated,“A spectator is passive, whereas a witness conveys a message after having seen.”
One piece, by the Syrian-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal, places excerpts from items written by inmates onto plaques fabricated from hardened lava. One reads, in Italian, “On this place, there isn’t any armor.” One other work has portraits of the prisoners as women and younger ladies by the French painter Claire Tabouret, based mostly on pictures equipped to her. The French hip-hop choreographer Bintou Dembélé has put collectively a dance to be carried out, partially, by inmates. Prisoners may even function docents, main guests by means of the reveals. (The guards additionally play a job: Guests go away their cellphones with a guard upon getting into, and guards accompany the guests and prisoners all through the area.)
Some 80 inmates dwell on the Giudecca, and Racine estimated that the majority of them would take part within the exhibition in a method or one other.
The constructing’s previous lives additionally characteristic in a number of the items to be exhibited. Constructed within the thirteenth century, the construction grew to become a convent within the sixteenth century, after which a hospital within the early nineteenth century, when the French ran Venice. It was subsequent a army jail beneath the Austrians later that century, earlier than turning into a civilian jail beneath the Italians within the 1900s.
The constructing’s present identify, the Convertite, speaks of the conversion by some prostitutes who took holy orders, in line with Dennis Romano, the creator of “Venice: The Exceptional Historical past of the Lagoon Metropolis.” In a cellphone interview, he mentioned: “It was a convent devoted to Mary Magdalene, which, in fact, made excellent sense for an establishment for reformed prostitutes, that moved in someday within the 1540s. By 1562, it had grow to be a cloistered order, one the place they weren’t supposed to depart.”
For the Vatican Pavilion, the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes plans to hold up one in all her cloth items excessive within the chapel the place a number of the prisoners worship, attaching it between the balconies and the confessionals. She defined in a press release that she hoped to attach “the unique operate of the place, the Baroque convent for ‘reconverted’ ladies with the present lifetime of the jail home, and the tales of ladies from all around the world.”
In Perego’s movie, the digital camera visits one other of the areas utilized by prisoners, the dormitory, the place Saldaña’s character and an inmate good friend share a wordless farewell on a camp mattress. Saldaña mentioned: “You might be questioning are they lovers, are they sisters, are they finest pals. There’s love, there’s a bond, and there’s a disappointment to know that they’re not going to be collectively once more.”
Perego mentioned, “Once we have been capturing, I mentioned, ‘Suppose you’re leaving dwelling.’” Surrounded by precise prisoners, Saldaña’s character revisits acquainted locations, just like the in-house tailor store, the place she has labored, and the bathe room; will get her coat from the guard; and walks into an arcaded courtyard, the place — from a balcony — the ladies look out at her and bang their tin mugs on a ledge to have fun her launch.
The Biennale present may even spotlight some elements of the best way Italian authorities run this jail. “Exhibiting in a jail means exhibiting a actuality that’s international to most individuals, who would by no means enter that area if it wasn’t for the artworks attracting them,” Parisi wrote in an e mail.
The penitentiary additionally has gardens, and the natural produce grown there by the prisoners (who’re paid for his or her work) is bought to the general public, and toiletries made in-house go into the loos of some prime Venetian motels. A neighborhood group of volunteers, Rio Terà dei Pensieri, helped jump-start these enterprises.
“There’s a actual custom of paternalism to Venetian charity, “ Romano mentioned. “The charitable establishments of the interval when this convent was based thought that you simply ought to offer folks a commerce.”
One other nod to the establishment’s convent previous is the inclusion of silk-screened prints by Corita Kent, a longtime Catholic nun and progressive activist who died in 1986. In an e mail, Parisi mentioned that Kent’s work was included for its mixture of “sacred texts, poetry, statements and Pop imagery, in works that problem conference.”
Kent’s look within the Vatican present represents a posthumous rehabilitation of types, since, in her lifetime, an American cardinal, James McIntyre, denounced her silk screens as blasphemous.
One other artist within the present, Maurizio Cattelan, provoked controversy in Catholic circles with a piece he made in 1999, a statue of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite. Cattelan’s contribution to the Vatican Pavilion is a sculpture of one other human on the bottom, an unidentified man, sleeping on the pavement with a canine for a companion.
The choice to contain inmates extensively in many of the items on this exhibition, Racine mentioned, was taken after session with a jail psychologist. “The undertaking is a singular alternative for the inmates to get a type of recognition,” he wrote in an e mail. “The undertaking goals at recognizing the dignity of the inmates with out forgetting that these ladies are serving lengthy sentences.”
Perego mentioned he and his co-writer, Alexander Dinelaris, referred to as their brief movie “Dovecote” after the normal small homes constructed for domesticated pigeons. Perego in contrast the inmates to those birds, noting that they each typically go unnoticed. “While you interview nearly all of these ladies, exterior, they really feel utterly invisible,” he mentioned.
A number of weeks after her go to for the shoot, Saldaña recalled: “The inmates will not be allowed to have cellphones, so the second they noticed me with my cellphone, they stored saying, ‘Take an image of me.’ Not solely take an image with me, however of me. They need to be seen, they need to be remembered.”
