{"id":13886,"date":"2019-07-12T08:07:31","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T06:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/?p=13886"},"modified":"2020-10-20T15:02:43","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T13:02:43","slug":"barca-nostra-the-art-of-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/geopolitics\/exile\/barca-nostra-the-art-of-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Barca Nostra: The Art of Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barca Nostra is docked at Arsenal, a shipyard that played a major role in establishing the Venetian commercial empire, founded on immigration and today a target for mass tourism. The location is therefore significant from a historical and socio-political perspective. The installation is a Christoph B\u00fcchel<\/a> creation, an artist who defends the subversive scope of his work, which is often controversial\u2014and always political. He previously attracted the wrath of Italian authorities during the 2015 Biennale, when he had a mosque built inside an ancient doge-district church. The initiative stoked the local church\u2019s anger and the Venice administrative court ordered the site to be closed for security. Barca Nostra, a rusted and disemboweled 50-ton carcass that contrasts with the surrounding Venetian ornamentation, is no exception. The title directly refers to Mare Nostrum, the search and rescue operation financially curtailed by the Italian government only a few months prior to the ship\u2019s sinking.<\/p>\n

But the installation has not only soured the Italian right, like the far-right party La Lega who calls for the boat to be repatriated to the artist\u2019s country of origin, Switzerland. Several media outlets criticize how Barca Nostra\u2014transported in a shroud in secrecy\u2014is exhibited without explanation, aside from the succinct one printed in the Biennale catalogue that few visitors actually buy and read. Passers-by will simply glance at it, intrigued perhaps, but without understanding its purpose, standing there across the way from a caf\u00e9 terrace where you can sip a cool drink in the shadow of drama.<\/p>\n

Christoph B\u00fcchel says he intentionally left out any explanatory elements so that people might react, interpret and discuss freely.<\/p>\n

Another point that stands out: The fact that B\u00fcchel himself did not conceive the installation rather appropriated it without modification or review. The ship is not an artistic reproduction but the original hull, nothing added nor retouched by the artist. The creation is in its displacement: in this case from Sicily, where the boat resided after having been fished out of the water in 2016, until Christoph B\u00fcchel obtained the necessary permits from the Italian authorities and Comit\u00e9 du 18 avril, an organization representing the shipwreck\u2019s victims. Removing the wreck from its context and placing it in that of the Biennale displaces, in a sense, responsibility for the disaster, and creates incongruence designed to grab the visitor\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Artworks that tackle contemporary dramatic events have been multiplying. At the same Biennale, you can see an installation by Korean artist Lee Bul<\/a> in homage to the Sewol ferry that sunk off the South Korean coast in April 2014, killing 304 passengers. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles<\/a> shows her \u201cMuro Ciudad Juarez\u201d, a wall covered in barbed wire and built out of bullet-ridden cinderblocks that once supported a school where four people were killed during a shooting in this US-Mexican border city. Margolles often collects primary materials from the Mexico morgue, to denounce violence by using its most radical and concrete element: the dead body.<\/p>\n

The use of death or catastrophe as a creative object, between sensationalism, morbid attraction and voyeurism, does succeed in highlighting certain ethical debates. But there is a thin line between exploiting a disaster and denouncing it.<\/p>\n

The debate surrounding Barca Nostra is reminiscent of the controversy over the 2015 photo of Aylan Kurdi\u2019s body, a 3-year old Syrian child who washed up dead on a Turkish shore. The image shocked and moved international opinion and inspired a number of artists, including Chinese artist Ai Weiwei<\/a>, who took a photo of himself on a Greek beach adopting the same posture as the child. The giant fresco painted by artists Justus Becker<\/a> and Oguz Sen<\/a> in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, a stone\u2019s throw from the European Central Bank, also reproduces Aylan\u2019s image face down in the sand, recognizable by his red t-shirt and blue shorts. The mural\u2019s location was no coincidence: the child\u2019s face floats above the Main river, a Rhine tributary whose Latin etymology moenia <\/em>means \u201cwall\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although emotions and protestations are running high right now, they seem to have no real impact on migratory policies. Which is why the shock-image or object is not always enough on its own, it requires social and historical context to raise real awareness, the sine qua non<\/em> for concrete change.<\/p>\n

This is why Italian journalist Lorenzo Tondo writes in the The Guardian<\/a> that \u201c\u201cdisplaying [the] wreckage in such a purely artistic context\u2014far from the institutions that were responsible for the tragedy or the communities that witness this kind of horror year in, year out\u2014risks losing any sense of political denunciation, transforming it into a piece in which provocation prevails over the goal of sensitising the viewer\u2019s mind. B\u00fcchel\u2019s decision risks creating yet another celebration of the nostalgia of tragedy without a corresponding act of conviction in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/div>\n

Translation by Maya Dalinsky
\nCover: Christoph B\u00fcchel, Barca Nostra<\/em>, 2018-19. \u00a9 RR
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barca Nostra is docked at Arsenal, a shipyard that played a major role in establishing the Venetian commercial empire, founded on immigration and today a target for mass tourism. The location is therefore significant from a historical and socio-political perspective. The installation is a Christoph B\u00fcchel creation, an artist who defends the subversive scope of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":13897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1844],"tags":[1865],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1598],"class_list":["post-13886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-exile","post_types-chronique-en","authors-camille-reynaud-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13886"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=13886"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=13886"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=13886"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=13886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}