A haunted house, being homesick & medieval execution methods

A homesick woman reflects on Home as a concept and its role at the Venice Biennale

During my stay here I have spent a lot of time thinking about this phenomenon; home. When does a place become a home, is it when you pick up the keys? When you've sorted your underwear and socks into appropriate drawers? Is it possibly when you´ve filled the space with a certain number of memories or perhaps when you first experience being somewhere out and about and get excited by the thought of coming "home"? Or is it more complicated than that? At Arsenale, the Icelandic pavilion stands alongside a row of intriguing pavilions from all over the world. This is where I spend my time when not at home dealing with departed souls in my living room. Two pavilions in particular have captured my attention that deal with the concept of home. The first is the Albanian pavilion, which shares the space next to us along with Senegal. The second is the Irish pavilion, which is the last of the countries presenting in this particular building we share.

The Albanian Pavilion is a solo exhibition by Albanian artist Iva Lulashi (b. 1988). Its title Love as a Glass of Water refers to Russian women's rights activist Alexandra Kollontai (b.1872, d. 1952).  Her theory discusses amongst other concepts, a revolution where our physical and emotional impulses are treated equally as our basic needs such as thirst, and that they should be relieved in self-evident and simple ways such as one would by drinking a glass of water when thirsty. The installation is a replica of the floor plan of the artist's apartment where she resides and works. The “apartment" is empty, except for the paintings, but the viewer is given hints about the role of each space. The bathroom walls have been tiled, and the living room floor carpeted. The works themselves feel cold and mysterious, yet simultaneously captivating, containing some type of ethereal beauty. To me, they are vulnerable and personal oil on canvas figurative paintings, painted with great sensitivity. The color palette is cold, but not in an aggressive way, rather evoking a feeling of a warm autumn evening or a distant nostalgic memory manifested in dream-like tones. According to the exhibition text, the works are based on stills from videos and films where a sexual act takes place. The scenes she has chosen are always right before, or right after the sexual encounter happens. This creates electrifying sexual tension and tangible sensual undertones in her paintings. Exhibiting these highly sensual works in a space mirroring the artist's home where they were created ultimately feels like an intensely personal experience. An atmosphere of voyeurism is created as if one is invading personal space, gazing into the intimacy one should not be allowed to see. Contradictorily, the decision to hang the paintings on walls that are suggestive of a home and not a gallery wraps the experience in a sense of everyday familiarity. It is as if you’ve encountered paintings hanging in the hallway of someone’s home you're visiting for the first time.

The Irish Pavilion presents us with a video installation titled Romantic Ireland by Eimear Walshe (b.1992). The work consists of six screens placed in an installation that forms walls around the screens and benches for the audience to sit on. The installation is built using an ancient construction method, earth building (Irish: metheal), practiced in ancient Ireland, drawing parallels with ancient forms of building around the world. There are many different types of earth building, the Icelandic “torfbær” is a parallel example, but this type of structure is simply described as having its materials obtained from the land on which they stand. This particular structure located in the Irish pavilion is made of soil that is collected in a wooden chamber and compressed and trampled on until stable, then the timber is removed. The video is staged in a similar structure (possibly the same one in which the viewer experiences the work) which is located on the rural west coast of Ireland. In the video, we follow the interactions of seven characters each representing a certain archetype from Irish social history between the 19th and 21st centuries. Each character's role is reflected in their costume design, all of them having green latex masks covering their faces. The characters have various encounters with each other. They form connections, dance, celebrate, and fight, but also work together to build the structure that surrounds them, which mirrors the one in which the viewer is located. The work is recorded on four smartphones that the characters continuously pass around. There is no dialogue but the work is accompanied by a soundtrack; a five-part opera by Amanda Feery (b.1984), composed alongside lyrics by Walshe. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of an elderly man on his deathbed, addressing a group of young men who have come to evict him from his home. The lyrics are heartbreaking and beautiful, as he describes his love and attachment to his home. He tells them the story of its construction and describes how he has maintained it with care over the years, how the house has become a part of him and he part of the house. The boundaries between them are blurred. He begs them to kindly allow him to die there, then come what may. The text also regularly quotes a famous speech by former Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera from 1943. In his speech, he makes various statements that paint a picture of the Irish nation. Families living in financial comfort in comfortable homesteads sharply contrast the situation in Ireland today, where the economic environment is unstable and there is a severe housing crisis. Although the history is incomparable, many aspects of the work remind me of the conditions back home in Iceland. In fact, they are closely related nations. The work evokes thoughts of hopelessness and injustice of the speed and chaos in our post-capitalist, western grind-set society. It provokes questions within me about the connection of body and space, gratitude for the tenacity and labor of my foremothers and fathers in our own not-so-distant version of earth-built houses, and to my great surprise; a deep and aching sense of being homesick.

The Father, Chuck Bass, and the Holy Spirit

Our living room here in Venice shares a wall with a Catholic church called Chiesa di San Canciano. It’s an ordinary neighborhood church, one you wouldn't notice is a church looking from the outside. We certainly didn't realize it was a church until hearing church bells so impossibly loud in our apartment. Come to find out, there is a literal bell tower on top of our roof, and the singing we hear vaguely through the wall on Sunday mornings is the mass choir. Of the 18 churches within a 400-meter radius around our house, this one is the least noticeable. Once inside it is surprisingly maximalist, ornate, and as magical as many Catholic churches tend to be, yet it bears the marks of not being maintained as vigorously as the tourist churches that surround it. Tired-looking paintings hang on the walls, some without frames, along with discolored pictures of some Italian priests. The wall we share with the church is the main altar. It is a marble dome surrounded by pale pink walls. On one side of the altarpiece there is a hole in the pink wallpaper so one can actually see the bricks that separate the altar from our living room. The altarpiece, believed to be painted by Paolo Zoppo dal Vaso (b.?, d.1515), sometime in the 15th or 16th century depicts the Holy Spirit in the form of a white dove. God himself floats above as an old man with a long white beard, accompanied by five chubby angels. On the ground below, two men named San Canziano after whom the church is named and San Massimo the first bishop of Turin stand gazing towards the sky in awe at the glory of heaven. A bizarre thought crosses my mind that beyond this centuries-old and history-loaded wall, the girls and I binge-watch Gossip Girl on my Apple computer and eat M&M's after a long day's work. Chuck Bass, M&M's, and Coca-Cola with ice cubes; the holy trinity. 

I have been wondering if the ghost that haunts our apartment is possibly connected to this fine church. Being one of the oldest churches in the city, it is believed to have been built in 864 exactly ten years before the settlement of Iceland. It was built by refugees who came to Venice from the Roman city Aquileia fleeing Attila the Hun and/or the Lombards several hundred years earlier. It is named after the siblings Canzio, Canziano, and Canzianilla who were saints and martyrs from Aquileia. On May 31, 304 AD all three siblings were beheaded for their faith, but that's a story for a different time. The church burned to the ground in the early 12th century. It was rebuilt in 1105 only to burn to a greater degree in 1550 after years of repair, leaving behind the structure that stands today. It is worth noting that the beloved Venetian womanizer Casanova, memorably portrayed by Australian heartthrob Heath Ledger in the 2005 movie Casanova, used this very church to smuggle love letters to his mistress Caterina. After Caterina became pregnant, she was forcibly sent to the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the Venetian island of Murano. Casanova had a messenger in the church whom he met in the confessionals who delivered letters, food, and clothes for him to his beloved Caterina at the convent. The "Liber mortuorum", or the obituary of one of the most famous painters of the Italian Renaissance named Tiziano is kept in the church's archive. Tiziano painted the iconic Venus of Urbino, amongst other celebrated paintings. The obituary reads: 27. August 1576, Messer Tizian Pitor has died of fever, aged 103. This was precisely during one of several horrendous plague periods that have befallen Venice throughout history, but that is also a story for a different time.

The Mystery of the Fifth Quarter

Outside of the church there is a small square named after it; Campo di San Canciano. This is where the girls and I go to take out our trash; cardboard on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, plastic, glass, and cans on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Like most facilities in Italy the boat that removes trash from the island, of course takes Sundays off. This is the circle of life of San Canciano Square; trash on weekdays, mass on Sundays. On the square there is a bridge over the canal which is nicknamed by the locals Ponte dei squartai, or "Bridge of the hanged, drawn and quartered”. There are two hooks on the bridge, one on each side of the corner, which I soon noticed locals walking by would touch and slam into the walls. This has created deep, hook-shaped holes in the marble behind them. I started taking part in this tradition as I walk to and from our neighborhood supermarket Coop, just around the corner. I didn’t know what it meant, but I assumed it was a sign of good luck or something similarly useful. After a bit of googling, I found out that no one knows for sure why these particular hooks are there, but that similar hooks can be found in four other places in the city. Each of them is known to have had a quarter of the remains of those who were executed by the old and effective method of being hung, drawn, and "quartered" as a warning to other potential troublemakers. The other four hooks are at busy travel points on the way in and out of the city leading to Padua, Mestre, Chioggia, and Lido. The head is then believed to have been hung between the two pink columns (all the other columns are white) on the Doge's Palace on San Marco Square. But there is a mystery about these particular hooks at San Canciano, because all the body parts have been assigned a place on the other hooks, and this bridge is not on a particularly busy route. Since they are in fact the same type of hooks, it can be assumed that they had the same purpose, but there is no record of it. However, it is said that touching these hooks will bring you good luck and protection from all evil. Certainly can’t hurt after all of the ghost stuff.

This is the fourth article about the Venice Biennale where the main themes and ideas are explored, as well as the national pavilions, the uncertainty of current events and the main exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere which is curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Newly graduated artists from Iceland University of the Arts and art theorists from The University of Iceland, interns situated in Venice, are currently working on articles and reports of key ideas and themes of current exhibitions of La Biennale. 

Herdís Hlíf Þorvaldsdóttir, also known as Herdill, is a Reykjavík based visual artist born in 1999. She mainly works in classic figurative, renaissance-esque oil painting. Herdill completed her BA degree in fine arts at the Icelandic University of the Arts (IUA) in the spring of 2023 but has also studied at Akureyri School of Visual Arts and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milano.