La Biennale Di Venezia

Bibi Jordan, HipSilver’s Travel Contributor, has traveled the world, written, photographed and published books.  Her latest adventure - the various ways single Silvers can travel.
Bibi’s first episode began in Italy during a work travel exchange where she “house sat” in a fabulous Italian villa overlooking breathtaking hills down to the sea.  In exchange for that experience, she looked after the owner’s cat and dog.  In this episode she is visiting the Art Biennale in Venice.  Enjoy the ride.

An Update from La Biennale Di Venezia
From HipSilver's Travel Curator, Bibi Jordan

Don’t Miss the Cue…

…when Serendipity, that master improviser, steals the spotlight.

Fortune has cast me in a three-week house-and-cat-sitting role in Venice, aligning perfectly with the 2024 Biennale di Venezia. This grandest of international art productions unfolds in two expansive “campos” of national pavilions and extends to hundreds of exhibitions staged in every conceivable corner of the city. From the labyrinthine alleyways to marble staircases, art installations await discovery in deconsecrated churches, storied palazzos, and verdant canal-side gardens.

Venice, like many UNESCO World Heritage sites, often doubles as a theatre of tourists, its local culture veiled beneath consumerist glitter. Hordes of enchanted, bucket-list travelers leave credit-card impressions at shops filled with Chinese-manufactured masks and dubious “Murano” glass. Yet, the Biennale provides a more avant-garde narrative, injecting a cosmopolitan energy that sets the stage for solo travelers like me.

At each artistic tableau I encounter, I pause, not merely to observe but to engage. I converse with student docents, Millennial and Gen X artists, and seasoned collectors—the OGs of the art world. After deciphering the art-speak riddles that accompany each piece, I dive into spirited dialogue: What do you think? How does this move you? What’s your favorite work here? The responses are remarkable—strangers from Australia to Zimbabwe converse with genuine curiosity and delight, and I weave through languages: English, Italian, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic.

Serendipity often cues an unexpected encounter. Take, for example, my visit to the UAE Pavilion. Titled “Sites of Memory,” the exhibit mesmerized with its themes of journey and recollection. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the Dubai-born docent had been a student of my Brazilian college best friend, now an art professor in Abu Dhabi where I once lived. 

Yet, nothing embodies the Biennale’s essence for me quite like Uzbekistan’s installation, aptly named Don’t Miss the Cue. The exhibit reimagines the “Houses of Culture,” spaces that once celebrated women’s contributions to national art and theatre. We step through a backstage dreamscape: dressing rooms draped in abandoned costumes and tapestries dyed in the protective indigo blue that wards off the evil eye—an eye that, today, casts suspicion on women’s public self-expression. The experience culminates on a stage where visitors are invited to alternate between being observed performers and shadowed observers, peering from the dim “Video Village” where live action is relayed on a bank of monitors.

The program notes extol the themes of visibility and invisibility, of presence and absence. Inspired, I take up the challenge. As I step into the spotlight, only to retreat into the curtain’s penumbra, I muse on this duality—my identity as a nomadic spirit, craving connection yet embracing solitude. There’s a Portuguese word for this: saudade, that bittersweet yearning for past loves and places, mingled with the hope of a future reunion.

Having played my part onstage, I settle into the darkness of the Video Village. My eyes, accustomed to the shadows, catch the glow of an iPhone Pro in front of me. A man with a filmmaker’s precision captures a lady in a denim dress sauntering through the installation. His technique is impeccable. My curiosity stirs. Isn’t the entire point of this exhibit to engage in community, to transform solitude into shared experience?

Summoning courage, I lean forward, my phone illuminating his face. “Would you mind filming me?” I think to ask. But that’s not the line that escapes my lips.

“Ricky?!!! Is that you?!”

It is indeed. Serendipity has entered, unbidden yet right on cue. Before me stand Rick and Ro, dear friends from half a century ago, companions from my London Film School days and once neighbors in Southern California. We embrace, awash in disbelief and delight.

And that, truly, is the magic of the Biennale di Venezia: Art becomes a mirror, awakening the soul, mending the heart, and weaving the bonds of shared humanity. As the curtain rises and falls, it is connection that takes a bow.