Issue 6

The European nomadic biennal

Hedwig Fijen

Photos by Oliver Spies Words by Kimberly Bradley

Dutch art historian Hedwig Fijen co-founded Manifesta and
has directed the event since its inception.

Manifesta, European Nomadic Biennial, has always had a mission extending beyond mere mega-exhibition. The nomadic exhibition is held every two years in a different European host city; since 1996 it has taken place in locations like San Sebastian and St. Petersburg, Limburg and Ljubljana. Founded from a desire to forge and strengthen intracontinental cultural ties, Manifesta reflects on the state of the European union via thought-provoking art, much of it newly commissioned and site-specific.

Each edition tackles macro issues, but always from a hyperlocal perspective; early Manifestas focused on east-west narratives, while more recent interactions have addressed globalism and migration.

Manifesta 12 runs until November in Palermo, Sicily, and mirrors the event’s depth, in some ways approaching art and its meaning like a think tank would. Its title, The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence, reflects Sicily’s millennia as a confluence of cultures — but also takes a wider view of French landscape architect Gilles Clement’s notion that humans are the stewards of earth’s garden. Extensive research and ongoing collaborations bracket the several-month exhibition period.

Dutch art historian Hedwig Fijen co-founded Manifesta and has directed the event ever since its inception. Nomad met with Fijen in Manifesta’s Amsterdam headquarters to discuss how coexistence can indeed be cultivated, how Europe’s story can be told, and whether art can still make a difference.

This Manifesta seems to especially resonate with the audience, in part due to its location: Palermo, the eternal crossroads of cultures, religions, goods and ideas. The city was also long under Mafia influence until mayor Leoluca Orlando began his campaigns against organised crime. It’s still a place where refugee rescue boats land in the harbour, where grand palazzi lie derelict. In some ways it’s a very rich place to mount an exhibition, but certainly challenging. What were your feelings, going in?

A week before the opening, I was looking from the windows of the Forcella De Seta (a palazzo that was once part of the city wall, facing the sea, and one of the exhibition venues). And as you look at the open sea, and you see the work of artists like John Gerrard and Laura Poitras inside these historical spaces, the immediate relationship with the location made it so urgent and necessary. I think the finest moment reflecting how politics synergised with a cultural moment was this: on the weekend of the opening, (Interior Minister Matteo) Salvani closed the borders of Italy, not allowing the Aquarius rescue boat to dock. Leoluca Orlando spoke against it and offered the port of Palermo. It was like the thematic approach of the biennial became visible in real life. That was very beautiful.

In The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence; a large number of projects deal with migration and refugees. We also had a mayor who supports us in his charismatic ways, going to the harbour every day and welcoming migrants as new Palermo citizens. This all helps.

So would you say the Manifesta 12 fulfilled what it set out to do?

I can only say this after Manifesta 12 has closed. I still wonder — are we reaching out enough to the local audience? We reopened a defunct open-air cinema in July. It’s beautiful and we screen films four evenings a week. OMA identified 150 films in the Palermo Atlas (architectural firm OMA conducted extensive urban research for the book Palermo Atlas. The work included tracing Palermo’s appearance in feature films). All these famous films, and the people can go for free! We’re doing university programmes and two conferences with public programmes, and then I’m in touch with the mayor, asking questions on how we can follow up.

Following up, or leaving the culture scene of a city richer or more connected than it was when you arrived, seems important to Manifesta, which is not always the case with other art exhibitions.

It’s about how a biennial can create instruments to give people energy and a new consciousness of possible future perspectives. Manifesta’s focus is on bringing awareness, on capacity building, on presenting an alternative model for living together, for coexistence. In this case, it’s mostly dependent on this quite remarkable mayor. He was acting as a fifth curator, which I haven’t seen in other biennials so far. And the question of what did Manifesta bring to Palermo? can be changed into what Palermo gave to Manifesta.

Fifth curator is a good way of putting it. Orlando’s vision of how culture can shift a city, but also his dream of a borderless society, is remarkable.

That’s because he was creating a political framework that was extremely important. To frame Manifesta not as this artificial, invasive biennial but as an instrument that blended with his aims and our ideology. One journalist wrote that it’s not often that you find a biennial in which local people — and not just people in the arts — can create an example of this kind of coexistence. I think this was most visible in the performances.

I agree. I saw Marinella Senatore’s Palermo Procession — a four-hour parade through the old city including marginalised local groups, marching bands, majorettes, and dancers — even some partisans from World War II. You could see so many communities coming together.

Absolutely. There were people very moved by it and joining in the procession.

I cried, too; it was incredible. I spoke to the artist; she told me the locals said the city changed through this artwork.

That was of course the intention of Manifesta as a whole: to not only talk about people — refugees, immigrants — but talk with them. For the opera during opening week, whose libretto explicitly touched on this idea of migration, we invited 300 refugees to the opening performance. What we mean by cultivating coexistence is that you can stage an alternative model of coexistence. It was touching.

How do you cope with criticism — people, many of them from the art world, assuming a northern European cultural body is colonising or gentrifying a southern city?

We did have to deal with this perception but I have to emphasise that everything is a collaboration; a co-creation. Seventy per cent of Manifesta 12’s staff are local. All works that were commissioned were done with local organisations. From Laura Poitras working with the film school, to Tania Bruguera, to Gilles Clement: every artist was linked to a local organisation. Cocreation means positioning the biennial deeply within the tissue of society. This is why it takes two or three years–and in advance of the opening we held many meetups with local communities: we had Cape Verdean tea ceremonies, Senegalese morning breakfast. Every community was invited.

What’s been the local reaction?

People are thanking us that we did so much for the city, which is humbling. But they feel and already see a transformation from six years ago or three years ago. But also now you see new shops opening, houses being renovated. I’m not saying it will all gentrify — hopefully not — but you can see economic activity now. It’s 90 percent due to the fact that this mayor is smart and radical. He knows he needs lots of endurance. He’s been there 25 years on and off and has led the fight against the Mafia. He sees what the city can be. For us, Palermo can be a model for the future. This is important for Manifesta: to be able to go to extraordinary cities in which we can explore what Europe is or could be.

Let’s go back to the beginning: how did Manifesta start in the 1990s and evolve thereafter?

It began in order to address the relationship between east and west after the fall of the Berlin wall. The focus was Europe and we could create a common language to decipher its ever-changing DNA. It’s been a very organic process. I’m a historian, so you learn to understand the places where you arrive and try to research precisely what is happening there. How can you tell a story about what Europe is about?

What happened in the various Manifestas?

We tried to turn the biennial into an art school — in Nicosia, which ultimately didn’t work (edit note: Manifesta 6, in 2006 was cancelled). Manifesta 9, in Genk, Belgium, was meant to give an answer to the economic crisis in a defunct coal mine — an analysis on the post-Fordist economic period was in a biennial of contemporary art! Then there was Manifesta 10, a biennial invading the most prestigious art institution in the world, the Hermitage, at a time in which Crimea was being invaded.

Manifesta 11 in Zurich was about how we earn our money, too, a commentary on basic income and precarity. The issues we face keep changing, and it also depends on what region in Europe we’re looking at. So much is shifting.

Yes. Europe is again in a phase of drastic changes now, but why are we so afraid of this change, of this transition process? Climate change, circulation — let’s not call it migration, but circulation of people — digitalisation, automation. How do we deal with how we’re completely out of control? You can see all these issues from different viewpoints. It’s like the metaphor of a diamond. Every two years, Manifesta looks at the diamond from geographically different perspective and tries to investigate.

The next edition takes place in Marseille, in 2020.

Yes. There, I’d love to create a thematic framework that touches upon what we now understand by the terms colonialism and post-colonialism and how this has affected our current status quo in policies. This urban collage of systems — how did history blend it all in? The arrival of the pieds noirs, one million French Algerians, in 1953 created a kind of community in a city, and it has never fully recovered. So the theme and the thematic framework in which Manifesta 13 will operate is very local and site-specific, but also touches upon a larger issue, which I think in many different areas is — how do we relate with our colonial past? How can we learn from our past to make sure we create a more holistic and honest perspective for all citizens of Marseille?

So much of what you do seems to be about inclusion.

After 25 years of working in this field, we have found that it’s not so difficult to create a biennial for the art scene’s in crowd. We’re not so interested in that. We’re interested in how people who normally don’t visit art galleries or institutions could be inspired to understand our times better.

The owner of the defunct open-air cinema in Palermo told me that no one had had the idea of reopening it; the cinema was closed for 25 years. We thought, this is the first step in renovating the Art Deco seaside. This is why we do it. To visualise the power and energy of art, so locals can take over and continue themselves. In that sense, Manifesta has facilitated something completely new in the art world, but also something new for local audiences. It’s a form of idealism.

Have past Manifestas also resulted in people taking over?

Actually, yes. In Belgium it was easy — there were 200 ex-miners who worked for Manifesta; afterward they created an association to maintain the building where the exhibition took place. One colleague told us that after Manifesta in St. Petersburg, a certain form of awareness or empowerment took place, so that now new contemporary art spaces are being built or refurbished; a result of the energy we brought through Manifesta 10. We can’t prove that it’s directly because of us, but it’s an important factor.

At the same time, we don’t have the institutional power to follow up on each host city for a long time. One politician was here to discuss how Manifesta could receive more EU funding and to help in what they call socio-political transformation processes, because finally the European Commission doesn’t see us as merely an exhibition: they see us as a tool in which transition processes can be involved.

Europe is changing, and the role of art and exhibition-making is changing, too. How will Manifesta go forward?

There are two potential ideas: one is to create a far more in-depth research institution in Manifesta itself; in which the biennial is focused on one of the geographically spread satellite programs. It could be a learning institution about what Europe is today … in all its aspects. For this we need a far broader economic perspective than we have now.

I would love to restage the biennial, not only in its temporality, but also in its kind of influence in mediating different energies locally. I can give you an example: after 25 years, Manifesta has more power to engage with different institutions. Many international universities want to work with us. I think we can engage with these institutions and maybe persuade them to do projects that aren’t normally so easy to do. For example, to reframe art collections. That’s what I’ve proposed for Manifesta 13 — a collaboration between a group of international museums — to work together on one collection reidentified from a postcolonial perspective.

So a pan-European collective art collection?

Yes, a collective collection from which to create an research exhibition based on colonialism versus post-colonialism, which could travel from one institution to another. This research requires combining functions from different museums and working together on experimental projects. That would be my really deep ambition. Another is to reidentify the biennial into a broader transdisciplinary framework.

How and why ?

I’m aware of biennial fatigue. And because I’m so aware of this fatigue, how and what can we do to recreate our mission? How do we create or develop collaboration models with other institutions which are may be facing other problems? A lot of contemporary art museums and historical museums are facing lack of funding to develop experimental curatorial frameworks or to commission new works. So I’m constantly thinking about cross-border cross-pollination; how we can collaborate.

Can art made and presented this way change the world, to put it simply?

In this biennial we spoke a lot about how to deal with the potential outcome of Manifesta — of how to occupy the commons, the public space. How to create instruments for people to reclaim their own city. Artists or thinkers or filmmakers or philosophers can inspire people to move their energy, to create a structure in which they bring this energy to somebody else.

This is where this cultivating part of the coexistence is coming from. You need to nurture it with an acute awareness of how multifaceted our world is and to create respect and appreciation. Maybe then that’s what politics cannot put into words or visualise. Isn’t it horrifying that there is nobody in the political sphere who can create these more abstract philosophical visions that inspire people? Can you think of any politician who gives you a little inspiration, a little motivation? Many people wrote to me, after this Manifesta, I felt a little hope or faith that we can create a better world. There are mind-blowing ideas that not only deal with human beings but species, minerals, data by means of which we can regain control. Ideas through which we don’t overrule the other, but we create an inclusive system in which everybody can participate.

It sounds idealistic, but isn’t that what art is about?