STRANIERI OVUNQUE ¿FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE?
-by Lorena Salamanca
These words are not unfamiliar to me… nor are they foreign.
© Studio Claire Fontaine. Photo: Archives Mennour. Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris
I wonder how many interpretations the phrase “Foreigners Everywhere” can have beyond the grand art event, its connections to commercial transfers, the critical nuances of global contemporary art, and the pretensions of reconstituting a Pangea without borders. I feel that this statement[1], first made in 2004 in multicolored neon and different languages by the artistic duo Claire Fontaine, intimately questions me about the constant experience of being and not being, of being just another entry in government paperwork and vibrating to the rhythm of a choreography of the impossible. I say impossible while whispering to myself these words:
““She was an impossible being: she united disparate things, bringing together what was long ago and what was over there, intertwining it with the here and now; thus, she always oscillated between estrangement and the familiar…””
But it’s not only about me. The need to understand why these words represent a strange way of presenting discourses of identity and homogeneity puts me before an urgent issue: how to navigate complexity. That is, to find in each universalizing argument the hidden stories, in this case, those of several generations of artists invited to the Venice Biennale. Navigating another world of invisibilities and shadows involves recognizing the weight of responsibility in each of our words and the echoes of other voices. Using a way of being and existing in a foreign world is too ineffectual to name what deprived individuals and communities of legal legitimacy experience and to explain the regression in global policies on large-scale displacements.
Foreigners Everywhere recreates the undeniable. The world we know has been built by stripping entire societies of their lands; consequently, foreigners, exiles, and stateless persons are reclaiming their place of belonging. Has Europe become invested in manufacturing “foreigners” everywhere? Is the status of “foreigner” a sweetened form of a dehumanizing/subhumanizing policy? If, on the other hand, this self-declaration is an act of total civil disobedience, why relativize existence in all its forms? And are we human foreigners on a planet that belonged to non-humans?
Transoceanic Cartographies
The Venice Biennale, with its design of national pavilions, seduces by presenting itself as something akin to a non-place. An airport with departures to other destinations, yet full of contradictions. It is astonishing to move from one pavilion to another without having to wait for migration bureaucracies. However, that guarantee of traversing different latitudes vanishes like a spark before embarking on the real journey: to arrive in Italy or Europe as a tourist requires belonging to a narrow class-based geopolitical framework, complete with credit cards and insurance. On the other end of that reality, travelers crossing the Mediterranean are rejected, sent to refugee camps, or exposed to deadly shipwrecks. In this reality, the Biennale continues the temporal fiction of a unified continent, not hiding its own exaltation of current maps, where hegemonic states are often political-administrative divisions that have little to do with transit and forms of habitability in the territories. Disconcertingly, these are cartographies of omission and denial of the societies that claim them. I reflect from the imagination and territorialization of those who struggle daily for their lives, being “foreigners in their own land,” but also from the monotony of Europe, which has institutionalized the rest of the world as an “other,” “savage,” and “uncivilized.”
The bombastic title that Adriano Pedrosa chose for his debut at this event, as the first chief curator from Latin America, echoes European modernity and an economic union that has shaped an increasingly inaccessible and closed territorial protectorate, but at the same time, more dependent on cheap and unregulated labor.
Institutions drown in their own pretensions when they ignore the words of those they intend to host. The minimal gesture that a biennale like this should resort to is to eliminate geopolitical replicas and the artistic façade that actually conceals a softened model of pavilion-embassies, with their ministers posing for photos. Even if this magnificent amusement park is dismantled, there is no valid architectural metaphor to encompass the urgency; that is, it cannot be hidden that nature redefines human borders through disaster.
A paradox of this space is the invitation extended to various Yanomami artists and the Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU), who belong to several Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. In recent years, their recognition in Brazilian art has increased, while the fires in their territories have grown exponentially, destroying their settlements and homes. Pedrosa has involved these artists in previous exhibitions and has worked with them for years; however, he seems to forget that the greatest threat and vehicle for extermination has been the Brazilian government itself and that the fire consuming those vast stretches of forest is extinguishing the “dream” of a world that allows us to breathe.[3] Everything that travels towards the Atlantic-North axis seems to end in co-optation or self-simulated domestication.
Disaster knows no borders, while geopolitical divisions function as traps of silent representativity. Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman, has written one of the most inspiring books for me in recent years, The Falling Sky.[4] Recently, a film adaptation was made that incorporates fragments of this book in an epistolary format, where Kopenawa and his neighbors narrate the arrival of a storm, the climatic transformation of the world that no wall or judicial order can stop. His message is a question: Will you be our allies?
© Studio Claire Fontaine. Photo: Archives Mennour. Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris
Everyday Life and Oppositions
Imagining territory is to take on a different kind of responsibility. For several years, I have understood my experience as a curator and writer through elusive, non-extractive fictions. In that sense, I have visually and textually wandered about liquid borders and osmotic membranes of personal and political self-exile, but also about the material conditions that remind me of the contradictory being that I am. This emotional and bodily ambiguity in my territorialization has been a constant impulse in my daily questioning: What are my ways of inhabiting? I inhabit fractures, institutional tensions, misunderstandings, the struggle against oblivion, and the thirst that arises from speaking without being understood. It’s another way of being in time; no one imagined that I could leap across thousands of kilometers or that I would celebrate my own diversions. Disobedience, both social and affective, stirs the monolithic history and the binaries of the world; there are many things I do not want to be part of, for example, a past I do not embrace as my own. I mention this because so many emotions do not fit within the word foreigner.
A writer claims that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” That idea that desire inhabits time is increasingly under discussion. I would say that the European past holds the melancholy of a continent without foreigners, without change. Thus, if, for some reason, the modern “foreigner” coincided with a notion of the “other,” it would do so in a world where neither the first nor the second inhabit memory or history. We struggle against the exile of social imagination.
The rise of authoritarian policies against re-signification and polyphonic and plural debate, along with the surge of conservative and pro-historicist movements, evidences that any form of agitation enrages them. Today, I am startled and amazed that while the words “strange” and “foreigner” are deliberately employed, the number of non-citizens grows rapidly, as highlighted by the proposal of the WienWoche 2024 festival with its call to join the movement of the unauthorized to be. Given that politics does not stand still, we see the instrumentalization of a term that is difficult for me to pronounce: re-migration.
© Studio Claire Fontaine. Photo: Archives Mennour. Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris
[1] Stranieri Ovunque was an anonymous anarchist group active in the early 2000s in Turin, Italy.
[2] Taussig, M. T. (2015). La magia del Estado [The magic of the State]. p. 21.
[3] Wells, I. (2024, October 3). Amazon’s record forest fires hit Brazil’s indigenous communities. Accessible online.
[4] Kopenawa, D., & Albert, B. (2023). The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Harvard University Press.
Lorena Tabares Salamanca is a researcher, writer, and independent curator specializing in contemporary art, archives, and social performance. In 2023, she earned a Master’s degree in Communication Sciences and the Arts from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her dissertation focused on the reenactments and poetics of the Zapatista Movement in the Journey for Life (2021), providing a critique of the colonial paradigms rooted in 16th-century navigations.
In her curatorial practice, Tabares Salamanca advocates for participatory and collective processes centered on political ecologies, the interrelation between human and non-human entities, the body, and its connection to the earth. She approaches topics in art history and performance art through para-colonial, counter-colonial, and anti-capitalist lenses.
Currently, Tabares Salamanca serves as the program coordinator for the archiving system plan of the Wienwoche festival, covering the years 2011 to 2023. She is also a curator and co-founder of the cultural association Colapso in Lisbon and a member of La Orgonización (MX).