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

We know how to reject. We discard what no longer serves us: objects, places, histories, bodies and people. We call what remains refuse. Yet the web of life rarely accepts our verdict. What we reject persists, returns and insists on being seen.

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.”

Venice itself is an apt setting for In Minor Keys. Long before it became a stage for empire, tourism and spectacle, the city grew from a scattered refuge in the lagoon. People escaping war, persecution and political collapse sought shelter among its shifting islands, constructing a city whose very foundations were improvised against catastrophe. Venice, too, began as a fugitive experiment: a fragile world assembled from displacement rather than certainty.

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 constellation of references—to the female nude in Western art, to Venice as an endangered amusement park slowly surrendering to rising sea levels, and to the possibility that this is humanity’s eleventh hour. Yet it also unfolds within a city that began as a sanctuary for those fleeing conquest and persecution. Holzinger’s installation turns Venice’s foundational relationship with water back upon itself. Water, once a refuge, has become contamination, spectacle and existential threat. We have become dissociated spectators, unwilling to look beyond the limits of our own immediate comfort.

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 common 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,” as James Baldwin wrote. She rejects the meagre fate society has allotted her. By 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 within our inadequate frameworks. It breaks out and in doing so makes things whole again.

Leaving the Biennale’s main venue at the Giardini, my eyes settle on the dark bronze figure of a woman stretched along the water’s edge. Augusto Murer’s Partigiana lies between lagoon and land, neither triumphant nor defeated. Around her, weathered piles rise from the water while discarded plastic bottles and wrappers drift against the embankment. Resistance and refuse occupy the same landscape.

It seems an unlikely monument until one remembers that Venice has repeatedly been a city of refuge: founded by those escaping violence, sustained by generations of migrants, merchants and exiles, and later scarred by fascism and war. The Partisan Woman gathers these histories into a single vulnerable body. She neither celebrates victory nor performs heroism. She simply remains.

I think of the final scene in Il Postino, and of Neruda’s quoted words about the sea:

“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 seeking what we cannot see, inexorably returning to what we fail to see or see but refuse to accept.

Koyo Kouoh, In Minor Keys (La Biennale di Venezia)
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/introduction-koyo-kouoh-koyo%E2%80%99s-team

Seaworld Venice, Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2026
https://www.seaworldvenice.at/

La Partigiana (Monument to the Partisan Woman), Augusto Murer, Venice
https://www.o2landscapes.com/essays/monument-to-the-female-resistance-fighter-venice/

Il Postino (1994), final scene quoting Pablo Neruda
https://youtu.be/3njKn_XKLi0?si=vKETzw9WK7LQ2P38https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/introduction-koyo-kouoh-koyo%E2%80%99s-team

Seaworld Venice, Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2026
https://www.seaworldvenice.at/

La Partigiana (Monument to the Partisan Woman), Augusto Murer, Venice
https://www.o2landscapes.com/essays/monument-to-the-female-resistance-fighter-venice/