On Translation: I Giardini

In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, 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 ten 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 frame the Biennale.