The Welsh pavilion, tucked away in a tiny, unassuming chapel just north of the Giardini and titled Music for the gift, has captured my heart and my attention. My classmates and I spent a little under two hours in an exhibit that occupies five rooms, and another hour and a half discussing it over cappuccinos afterwards. Part of its draw, I think, is that it is unassuming—there are no technical gimmicks to be found, and the pavilion itself is a little hidden. It feels almost private—when we visited, we were the only people there besides the attendant—which, in a subtle site-specificity that’s more about emotion than physical space, serves the work thematically.
The artist, James Richards, is billed as the sole author of the pavilion, but many of the pieces are collaborations with other artists or writers. The hand of the artist is undeniably there in each piece, though, since the whole pavilion feels cohesive both in theme and execution. Richards was born in Cardiff, has shown in the international exhibition of the Biennale previously, and was nominated for the Turner prize in 2014. His work, as far as I can tell online, is mostly video, though his work in the pavilion is more broad in its medium. He collages his films out of found and original footage and composes the scores himself.
As you walk by, the pavilion inevitably draws you into its dark little space through the ambient noise emanating out into the street. Initially, it might sound like music, but the first piece in the pavilion—though certainly musical—is more of a composition of sound than of notes. The first piece, entitled Migratory Motor Complex, is both a sound installation and a lattice-like bench, giving the viewer the option to face any direction, or lie down and look at the painted ceiling of this small chapel. The attendant even encouraged me to lie down, and noted that she’d seen many people use the space to nap. I think the fact that the space itself is welcoming and the bench is comfortable is incredibly important to the pacing of this exhibition which was, quite frankly, what made it so successful. I recognize as a viewer that it sometimes takes time for me to transition from the world of the quotidian to whatever world the artist wants me to experience, and Richards’ choice of beginning his installation with a sound piece and place to sit was a successful way of allowing the viewer to sink deeply into the mood of the work. I asked the attendant how long the work was, and she answered that since it was on a loop, it was difficult to tell. My guess is somewhere around the half an hour mark, but since there are motifs that thread through the whole work it could be that I hadn’t heard it repeat even though I thought I had. It seemed to me that at certain points, the sound had been recorded in the very space I found myself in, and at others, recorded in a much, much larger or smaller one. Richards was certainly playing with the viewers’ sense of space, as well as the religious connotation of the chapel. What may have not felt reverent and weighty elsewhere felt somehow more so in a chapel, surrounded by ornate paintings and a sculptural altarpiece. Either way, after a good twenty minutes of absorption, I moved to the next room as if in a daze.
Holding only a table with stacks and stacks of small, shrink-wrapped artist’s books, this room encouraged the viewer to shuttle rather quickly into a small courtyard and through to the rest of the exhibition. There was no bench for reading the books, and, though I grabbed one, I did not read it until after I had left the exhibition. The shrink-wrap and the absence of any sort of garbage can in which to dispose of it seemed to subtly encourage me to wait.
The next space held a two-channel video installation, and the room to the left was full of photography. Immediately, though, I was drawn into the black curtain to the right. What weakens the flesh is the flesh itself, a collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Steve Reinke, is a 45-minute film shown as a loop. I encountered it right in the middle, but since there is no narrative, it seems unimportant when the viewer encounters the work, so long as they see the whole thing. Because, even though there is no narrative, there is a point, which becomes abundantly clear once the video loops. The proper cycle of the film begins with the personal photographs of Albrecht Becker, a photographer imprisoned by the Nazis for being a homosexual. These photographs begin unedited, but soon, Becker is doubled or tripled, in various states of undress, and his extensive tattoos and genital modifications are revealed to us. His name is never given in the film, and neither is his story, but this decontextualization suits the rest of the film. After the Becker photos follows a series of images, some disturbing, some sweet, with occasional text cards or narration layered over an original soundtrack. The final effect is, in a word, haunting. Richards deftly describes his point by not describing it at all; he circumnavigates the Becker story with tangential anecdotes that seem to have little in common other than an overarching mood. Clips I remember include a man cupping his hands in a sink so that a bird can bathe in them, a group of soldiers, boys being directed to crush fruit against their bodies or struggle in a mock-fight, computer-generated imagery of a car repeatedly running over a crash test dummy, and a narration of a man’s obsession with a found photograph of a boy. There are some sounds from Migratory Motor Complex that seem to reappear, and he similarly uses a deft melange of analog and digital footage and sound. Certain broad themes emerge—masculinity, abjection, memory—but what is most remarkable is that it is because the clips seem to have so little to do with one another that a highly specific mood is described. It’s as if Richards is describing a specific emotional state by collaging images all around it, leaving us to read the negative space.
On my way back out, I sat again with Migratory Motor Complex, lying down and closing my eyes (though I didn’t fall asleep– I admire those who could nap with such a disturbing soundtrack). After two hours in the exhibition, I emerged into the Venetian sunlight with the artist’s book in my hand and a cappuccino on my mind. Sitting under the cafe umbrella, I read Voce di testa, a long prose poem by Chris McCormack about the history of preserving a boy’s childhood voice into adulthood via various means, including castration. It shuttles between scientific language describing the methods and means of the practice and an abject description of the author’s body. There was a woman’s voice used in the sound piece, but, after reading Voce di testa, it was suddenly complicated: for what is the difference between a boy’s voice and a woman’s? It was here that I realized two things: firstly, that there was no female presence in any of the works I had just seen, and secondly, that this in no way made me feel alienated or like I wasn’t able to gather emotional depth from the work. Despite the installation being largely about masculinity and homosexuality, there were no mechanisms in the work that precluded me from feeling a connection with it. I think this speaks to the calibre of Richards’ work, as well as its intended subjectivity; it truly is a piece more about specific, universal emotions, and the Becker story as well as Voce di testa were simply a means by which Richards allowed the viewer to access those emotions. Even if I, as a woman, can’t see myself in the mechanism of the story, the more universal feelings it describes are something familiar. This is a work that’s stuck with me; I find myself rereading Voce di testa, remembering certain clips from the film, or getting sound bytes from the soundtrack stuck in my head. And, even though there are pavilions I haven’t yet visited, I will undoubtedly revisit the Welsh pavilion again, if only to get lost in the microcosm Richards crafts so deliberately.