WATER, CYCLES AND TRANSFORMATION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

The French Pavilion exhibits works by Franco-Caribbean artists Julien Creuzet, examining water as a force of connection and powerful cultural anachrony. Creuzet explores the role of the sea as a carrier of human and natural testimonies. This kind of trans-oceanic meaning-making stands for interpretative freedom, represented in the immersive nature of this exhibition. Sculpture, video and sound engulf the visitor with the rhythms of confluence. Water becomes a channel, a language and a living resistance to Western domination.

The title of the exhibition Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon evokes the depth of paradox, and illustrates Creuzet’s irreducible poetic character. It amalgams references to the collective imaginarium of Martinique, forces of nature and Roman mythology; thereby conceiving of a world within the world.

The Greek Pavilion, titled Xirómero / Dryland, focuses on water as a contested resource and a symbol of division. The sound and video installation explores how water scarcity exacerbates geopolitical tensions and territorial conflicts. The agricultural character emphasizes the disparity between shared identity and private ownership, utilizing the cyclical nature of water as a continuously contested resource. The theme of irrigation brings up the conflict of drought, providing a global read to the installation.

Here, water is not serene but unrestful. An object of competition, water represents survival. Throughout the video works and the installation of agricultural objects, the sense of community is contrasted to water as a barrier. This provides an essential shift from the particular to the universal, the located to the foreign.

Otero Torres’ Aguacero is an ephemeral site-specific installation. This complex and layered piece draws on the vernacular architecture of the Embera community, which lives along the Atrato river and yet struggles to access clean, unpolluted water (Carneiro 2024). This tragedy, and the collective efforts made to overcome it, represent the global, rising crisis of the climate, and the fact that marginal communities are affected the most.

The structure of the installation depicts inventiveness but also exposes the fragility of technology. Its title Aguacero (downpour in Spanish) confronts the viewer with the physicality of environmental injustice, highlighting the destructive power of too much or too little water. This meditation, favored by the sound effects of the water cascading, echoes the delicate balance between awe and unease that humans must preserve in its relationship to nature.

Water, in its various forms, functions and flows, evokes in the 2024 Venice Biennale a sense of regeneration of meaning, conflict and division, and survival. In some sense, what the Greek pavilion exposes, the French pavilion redefines. As in Otero Torres’ installation, we see the shapeshift of water as a site of conflict and dialogue. Following water’s path along the Biennale, we see it becoming equally poetic and political. The conversation runs deep; the forces, urgently essential.