At the request of Cardinal José Toledo de Mendonça, dicastery – a sort of minister of culture and education – of the Vatican, but also poet recognized in his country of birth, Portugal, Bruno Racine (who directs the Pinault collections at Venice) and Chiara Parisi (director of the Center Pompidou-Metz) organized the exhibition at the Vatican pavilion in Venice. This is his third participation in the art biennial (after 2013 and 2015), and Pope Francis, who is expected to visit the pavilion on April 28, has requested that the Holy See now be present at each edition.
The originality of this pavilion lies in its location. Looking for a place that would be a message in itself, Bruno Racine chose the women’s prison located on the island of Giudecca. A former convent dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene (it once housed repentant prostitutes), it now contains eighty inmates sentenced to long sentences. Among them, ten volunteers were trained to become guides for an exhibition which can be visited in groups of twenty-five people, for forty minutes, by prior reservation (there are five slots per day). For security reasons, and undoubtedly to avoid any form of voyeurism, photographs are prohibited, cell phones remain in the locker room.
Family photos of inmates
Ten artists were selected: Maurizio Cattelan, Bintou Dembélé, Simone Fattal, the Claire Fontaine duo, Sonia Gomes, Corita Kent, Marco Perego and Zoe Saldana, and Claire Tabouret. Cattelan’s work, the only one visible from the outside because it is painted on the facade of the convent chapel, which overlooks the street, represents the soles of two bare feet. An allusion to both Christ mort by Mantegna (1431-1506), even if these feet do not have stigmata, as in Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet before drying them with her hair, but also in the washing of the feet practiced by Jesus in sign of humility. Cattelan also designed a special issue of The Street Observerthe Vatican newspaper, to be published in June.
Simone Fattal has reproduced poems from the prisoners on a series of enameled lava plaques. The Claire Fontaine duo installs some neon lights, one of which represents an eye, an allusion to the title of the exhibition, “With my eyes”. Claire Tabouret, whose painting can sometimes be judged to be grandiloquent or easy, achieved a masterstroke here: she asked the inmates for family photos, of themselves, their children or their loved ones, which she painted on quite small formats and which are of rare power.
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