Editor’s Note – Issue 15 (Non-Fiction)

This year’s Art Biennale in Venice takes place under the motto In Minor Keys, a phrase drawn from the late Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial vision. “Though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world,” she writes, “the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.”

I visit the Austrian Pavilion first, where the controversial performance artist Florentina Holzinger has created Seaworld Venice. On entering, one is confronted by a naked figure immersed in a tank filled with the recycled urine of visitors. T-shirts emblazoned with the words “I live in your piss” flicker through the sometimes bemused, often repulsed, mostly thoughtful crowd. Cleaning women stand by, offering disinfectant gel and advising visitors to sit down in the Portaloos. A team of naked women performers moves between stations in a choreography organised around a rotating wind vane: riding a water ski in circles while the air fills with the whine of machinery and the smell of exhaust. Five minutes before the end of an hour, a giant bell sounds solemnly, a naked woman suspended upside down as its clapper.

It is an elaborate allegory—or perhaps a series of references—to the female nude in Western art, to Venice as an amusement park endangered by rising sea levels and that this probably is the eleventh hour for our species. We are disassociated spectators, unwilling to see beyond our noses.

In this issue of Usawa, Glittering Bodies Dancing follows a young woman who jitters between bodies—hers and others—and within an environment that will not accommodate her complexity. Hers is an uncertain yet continuous resistance to accepting the world as mere apparition: a deeply humane self-view that includes the other while refusing to surrender itself or concede ground.

In Nothing Happened in Zhao’s Kitchen, self-denial is a survival strategy. Nevertheless, the body asserts its authority: to make a mess and clean up after itself, to speak up for oneself and others.

In Turtles on Stilts, an elder woman’s “love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”, as James Baldwin wrote. She rejects the meagre fate society has allotted her: mothering a child otherwise left neglected she moves into agency.

In My Mother’s Last Days, a daughter remembers her mother. Grieving is the stubborn act of keeping the departed in memory: an insistence that people and relationships matter despite the planet’s inexorable turning. We care for those—and that—which we love by seeing them whole, especially, perhaps, when it hurts.

In A Familiar Hill, we return to the rejected, which itself refuses to disappear. It takes its place at the centre of things, like the Cockroach Janta Party asserting its presence on Indian streets and screens. The rejected and reviled is the substance of what we fail to integrate in our inadequate frameworks. It breaks out, insisting on its presence, and in doing so makes things whole again.

Leaving the Biennale’s main venue at Giardini, my eyes scan the horizon only to encounter a dark metal figure of a woman lying at the waterline. Irregular columns jut out around her; closer to land lies a detritus of bottles, plastic wrappers and other debris. A Google search reveals that it is the monument to the Partisan Woman, designed by Augusto Murer in 1961.

I think of the italian film Il Postino, and of Neruda’s words about the sea quoted in it:

“Here surrounding the island, there’s sea. But what sea? It’s always overflowing. Says yes, then no, then no again, and no, says yes…”

The sea, in its ceaseless movement between yes and no, refuses the finality of either. Perhaps this, too, is a minor key: not the grand declaration, but the persistent, unsettled movement between resistance and affirmation.

Nothing is lost or given away in the web of life. We are forever returning to what we fail to see, cannot see, or see but refuse to accept.