Treat Your Villains With Love
New York-based critic SKC meets Gaddafi and Berlusconi in Venice + an announcement
💃 Get the details for Curatorial Affairs’ first live event on Friday, June 7th here 💃
🔃 Read Anna Kornbluh on her latest book, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism here 🔃
🚆 Read Gabrielle Sicam on Jesper List Thomsen’s exhibition at Hot Wheels London here 🚆
Alessandra Ferrini’s video installation Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship (2024) considers the history of Italian colonialism in Libya, indigenous resistance, and most precisely the “Treaty of Friendship, Partnership, and Cooperation, between Italy and Libya” signed by Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2008.
In a very poorly curated 2024 Venice Biennale titled Foreigners Everywhere, this work stood out. I was immediately drawn in by the large wall piece with a visage of Gaddafi – a bizarre, conflicted, anti-colonial yet authoritarian figure – certainly ripe for creative minds to engage with. His pan-Africanism, sartorial choices, and hunk-ish good looks in his youth only make him a juicier subject.
One of the linchpins of Ferrini’s narrative is that when Gaddafi signed the Treaty of Friendship he had an image of a shackled Libyan freedom fighter, Omar Al-Mukhtar, pinned to his uniform. This signalled that although Gaddafi was willing to “kiss and make up,” largely for the sake of accepting monetary reparations, he was still anti-colonialist. A very cogent description of how the Treaty of Friendship was self-serving for Rome – it awarded hydrocarbon extraction contracts to Italian firms, essentially pushing the border of the European Union to Libya, thus stemming migration – rounds out the facts presented.
Ferrini touches upon titillating points of interests, some of which are good starts for further exploration: beyond looking alike, Berlusconi and Gaddafi shared a plastic surgeon (perhaps providing context to their resemblance).
However, the video never concedes just how bizarre the two “stars” of her film are, focusing only on the evil they share. Precisely because it only lays out the facts (and a few cliché and uninvestigated feelings), it is not greater than the sum of its parts. In being didactic, it shoots off its own feet as art.
The piece certainly functions as a document of history, maybe even as proto-activism. However it disappoints in two ways that are felt throughout most of the biennale:
1) It fails as art (i.e., something that is not utilitarian, that has room for ambiguity, and challenges viewers intellect, emotions, and humanity).
2) It foregrounds grievance, rather than demands political change.
Is Ferrini calling for reparations for victims of colonisation worldwide? In Libya? Does she think that there should be open borders and migration? Or, is the purpose of her work recording the past, lest we forget?
Disappointingly, alongside many other artists and the curators of this year’s biennale, any substance, artistic or political, evaporates in the solipsistic virtue signalling of Foreigners Everywhere.
Image Credit:
Courtesy of Alessandra Ferrini
An Announcement
Over the Basel fairs, I will be writing a “Basel Diary” every day, beginning on June 8th (last day of install for Basel Social Club, which I’ll be participating in with S4EP6), and ending June 17th (deinstall and the last day of the fairs). While it will be a lot, I hope that the product is something entertaining, if not illuminating. I look forward to what’s to come.
— JB