"No matter where you find yourself, you are always, truly and deep inside, a foreigner”: these words, pronounced by curator Adriano Pedrosa during the second press conference anticipating the 60^th Venice Art Biennale, opening on April 20, 2024, masterfully exemplify the core message of this edition. Since the announcement of the title Foreigners Everywhere last June, Pedrosa has always pointed out a truth that is often forgotten, namely how the conditions of displacement and marginality may affect every single human being, regardless of their identity. Nowadays, the mistake of perceiving these conditions as reflections of otherness that can only exist outside of us is still a widespread and often tragic reality: we can see the consequences all around us. In response to such global challenges, this year’s Venice Biennale involves a total number of 90 participating countries (four of which are participating for the first time), in addition to 30 Collateral Events, promising to become a platform for a multitude of stories that might be easily neglected, here narrated through the eyes of the immigrant, the exiled, the indigenous, the outsider and the queer.

The title of this edition comes from a series of works made by the Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine founded in 2004. In fact, after 20 years, her neon sculptures will be displayed in the evocative setting of the Gaggiandre shipyards at the Arsenale—still question our consciences by amplifying the words 'Foreigners Everywhere' in 53 languages from around the world, with special attention to those that are severely endangered or already extinct. In the present moment, when the complex subject of identity is at the heart of constant debate, the condition of being a stranger takes on multiple nuances due to language differences. For instance, when stranger is translated into Pedrosa’s mother tongue with the Portuguese word o estranho, it can also be interpreted as the uncanny, the disturbing and yet familiar side of our self, theorised in psychoanalytic terms by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as Das Unheimliche in German. This wide sense of "stranger" draws a continuity from The Milk of Dreams (2022), the previous edition of the Venice Art Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani while adding new elements to the debate and expanding the scope of inquiry.

No matter where you find yourself, you are always, truly and deep inside, a foreigner. – Adriano Pedrosa, Curator, 60th Venice Art Biennale.

Roberto Cicutto, completing his tenure as President of La Biennale di Venezia in March 2024, recalled the almost prophetic meaning of the first exhibition of his term in 2020, The Disquieted Muses. La Biennale di Venezia meets History: in fact, it might be argued that the exhibition—focused on the Historic Archive of the Venetian institution and settled in the middle of the COVID pandemic by Alemani as an alternative to the regular Biennale programme—predicted the growing precariousness we have been experiencing in the last few years. According to Cicutto, 'Foreigners Everywhere' deals with "a universal and transversal theme of burning relevance” that might encourage further change. If the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 proposed a relevant shift of perspective—thanks to the highly interdisciplinary programme curated by Lesley Lokko, the Art Biennale 2024 reaffirms the importance of the Global South as well as the representation of artists forcibly existing on the (so-called) margins.

Furthermore, 'Foreigners Everywhere' is going to be current, not exclusively from a historical point of view thanks to the location of the Biennale itself. Pedrosa mentioned that Venice was originally founded by fleeing refugees more than 1,600 years ago, becoming a place of exchange and coexistence between different cultures and welcoming exiles, migrants and travellers long before mass tourism took over its bylanes and waterways. No less significant is the established role of Venice in the Mediterranean, with an extremely high number of refugees who attempt to cross the sea and often find death in its depths. In addition, Pedrosa mentioned his own identity—with the interweaving of indigenous and diasporic influences in Brazil and noted he is the first openly queer curator of the Venice Biennale.

Coming now to the structure of the exhibition will be divided into two main sections: Nucleo Storico (Historical Nucleus) and Nucleo Contemporaneo (Contemporary Nucleus). Nucleo Storico will propose a new perspective on Modernism, exploring its developments across the Global South throughout the 20^th century and how it has been habilitated outside Europe (a reference to the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade and his renowned notion of antropofagia (from the Manifesto Antropófago, dating to 1928). After two halls respectively dedicated to the representation of human figures and abstraction, the third will be a tribute to the Italian artistic diaspora: this will be rediscovered through the glass easel display system originally designed by the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), who moved to Brazil in 1946 and soon became an important representative of Brazilian modernism. Approaching Nucleo Contemporaneo, we should expect a close examination of the relationship between art and activism, now more relevant than ever, thanks to the Disobedience Archive video project in 2005 by Marco Scotini, investigating the topics of diaspora activism and gender disobedience between 1975 and 2023.

Considering the International Exhibition as a whole, another aspect that should be considered is the significant number of artists using textiles, a medium historically marginalised through the distinction between fine and applied arts. We should remember how textiles have already become an emerging trend in recent editions of Biennale which still deserves more consideration. In this regard, we might quote what the Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925-2021), who investigated the expressive potential of the textile field and whose work is included in the exhibition, wrote about weaving: an intimate world as hypnotising as the infinitely wide one (Life is a Weaving, 2016). Weaving is a universal metaphor that concerns identity as well as human relations, a further meaningful aspect in 'Foreigners Everywhere': artists related by family bonds—particularly those belonging to indigenous cultures across the Global South, who consequently have been practising unique ways of knowledge transmission, will also be among the protagonists.

In a world where the nuances of humanity often get disrespected, the visual identity design of the exhibition by the San Paolo-based Estudio Campo (Paula Tinoco, Roderico Souza, Carolina Aboarrage) invites us to welcome these shades even in the middle of darkness. We can hope that 'Foreigners Everywhere' will awaken our consciences, giving us the possibility to rediscover the stranger that exists in each of us.  

The mandate of the 60th Venice Biennale, which aims to highlight under-represented artists and art histories, aligns with the STIR philosophy of challenging the status quo and presenting powerful perspectives. Explore our series on the Biennale, STIRring 'Everywhere' in Venice, which brings you a curated selection of the burgeoning creative activity in the historic city of Venice, in a range of textual and audiovisual formats.