Renn, Namibian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

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“A bridge to the desert” is a game of allusions to which everyone must be free to give their own interpretation. It is also RENN’s invitation to enjoy the works in total freedom, free from any influence, first and foremost from the personality of the Artists, who from the very start did not want to put their name to the works.

However, in a monograph readers try to look for a clue, an opinion that they can consider. An editor cannot avoid offering some suggestions at least. Here are some interpretations, limiting ourselves to the most immediate: the first bridge is precisely that of the exhibition, within the 59th Biennale Arte, which presents to an international audience this work that was originally entrusted to the care of the oldest desert in the world. But the work itself is also a bridge that invites reflection on the relationship between the different human cultures, represented by the sculptures scattered around the desert. A bridge that is reflected in the conceptual mirror of all the statues taken together, which represent the human race as a species, in turn called upon to reflect on its own place in nature. This nature has an essential beauty, consisting of colors, shadows, spaces and times that are typical of a place as far away from today’s artificial habitat as what Aristotle called “the social animal” and that today we ought to call “the artificial animal”: ethologists have shown that many other species have social structures, build, and use tools, but only humankind has detached itself from nature to such an extreme extent and positioned itself outside it, shaping it to its liking, from the bowels of the earth to space, from the depths of the sea to the constituent components of its genetic heritage. By choosing to have these stone figures communicate with these primordial natural surroundings, almost older than life itself, in landscapes that appear to belong to some as yet uninhabited planet, it is possible to sense the call to reflect on this extraordinary event in the universe’s history: the result of billions of years of the chance evolution of particles that make up the very fabric of time and space, the atoms, the molecules, the galaxies, the planets, and then the seas, before the advent of the primordial bubbles of systematic organic material that developed into “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”* that are increasingly complex and interconnected, until the appearance of one of these forms capable of studying all the others and all this, tearing the veil of mystery beyond the limited abilities of its sensory apparatuses to comprehend the mechanisms of nature itself, going so far as to bend them to its needs and wishes. This product of chance evolution that can now excuse itself from the basic mechanisms that created it and that have created all nature must now reckon with this divine power to overturn chance and invent progress: in a universe where everything is down to chance, it has to invent good and evil, right and wrong. How is it possible not to feel like petrified individuals lost in the desert?