In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the
first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish pavilion,
told a reporter that the Biennale takes its ideas from international
fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the
new... but by now it is an obsolete structure. Muntadas's On
Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific
On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here
documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas
states, I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a
cultural sense--how the world we live in is a totally translated world,
everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and
economic factor... by the media, of course, by context and by history.
Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the
Biennale's Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and
translations it has undergone over time, and investigating Venice's
status and the space that frames the Biennale. Muntadas notes, for
instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussolini's orders was
replaced again after the war.
