Eliana Willis

Sited on the edge of the Mediterranean, the ancient port city of Marseille is attached by land to the mainland of Europe while it faces the Global South, to which it is deeply connected, on its horizon.
In Marseille, issues around trade, ecology, housing, and immigration stand on a knife’s edge, epitomizing some of the biggest challenges facing the world today. These were all central concerns for the three curators of Manifesta 13, even before the pandemic emerged to render them even more acute.
After an initial postponement from its planned June start, the main exhibition’s first chapter opened last week, August 28, without the typical stampede of international visitors, but to local audiences. Curated by Alya Sebti, director of Berlin’s ifa Gallery; Katerina Chuchalina, chief curator at the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow and Venice; and Stefan Kalmár, director of the ICA in London, the exhibition and accompanying programs were always meant to unfold in chapters and across various locations—a choice that became paramount to the show moving forward in the midst of the ongoing health crisis.
“We never thought of Manifesta 13 as a full stop, but always as a hyphen, or rather hyphens,” the curators wrote in a statement shared in June.
The central show, “Traits d’union.s,” unfurls across several overlapping metaphoric places: the refuge, the almshouse, the port, and the park. But first to be presented is a series of works around the concept of home, a particularly vexed term in a year marked by lockdowns and rising xenophobia.
The biennial begins at a bourgeois 19th-century villa with an interior that has been decorated by contemporary artists and local activists. The entirety of Manifesta 13 will unfold across the city until October 9, when everything will finally be on view at the same time. Over 100 sites will be in use through the entirety of the exhibition.
We spoke with Kalmár, who is also a former resident of the city, about the challenges and opportunities presented by the current social and political climate.
A view of Marseille.

What has it been like to curate this show in the middle of a pandemic?
We are the “pandemic biennial” [laughs]. Of course, I am happy we’re doing it for many reasons. Marseille is representative of so many of our global challenges. It’s a good moment in the history of the city. We saw a change of government three weeks ago for the first time in 25 years to a left-green coalition and its first female mayor ever. The last two years, the Manifesta team had worked as a somewhat undercover operation after being invited by a city government that probably had very different aspirations for a European biennial than we did. The hopes sometimes held by local officials are very different ones than what maybe an artistic team of a biennial wants to do. There is an element of criticality to which the former city government did not necessarily subscribe.
One of the exhibition’s first focuses is on the home. Can you explain how this came to be?
On November 5 2018, an inner-city building collapsed in Marseille and killed 8 people. It became representative of the decline of the city’s government at the time. A lot of these issues, in particular the ones surrounding the problem of housing in Marseille, were at stake while we were working here. So now [with this change of government], this exhibition which was working towards change is now a part of it and also a manifestation of that positive change.
How are you hoping to affect the city?
Even pre-pandemic, we always thought that, first and foremost, Manifesta 13 needs to speak to local audiences. Back then, we had always thought about opening it in chapters successively. Equally, the selection of venues also spoke to that, in terms of avoiding a form of poverty tourism or property scouting. At Manifesta 12 in Palermo, people often spoke more about the property prizes and the Palazzos than the art.
The shows will be unfolding across various institutions throughout the city over the next several months. Why did you choose to work with individual institutions specifically?
Our main question is what value and what role can institutions, as pillars of democracy, perform—particularly if those institutions are under threat from what are often conflicting points on the political spectrum.
We are working with differently charged institutions. For example, we are opened the first “plot” of the show, the “home,” at Musée Grobet-Labadié, an 19th-century home owned by a bourgeois family who donated the collection inside it to the city of Marseille. The question we are interested here is: whose collection and whose idea of representation are we looking at? [Visiting the museum] is like window shopping. You look at essentially a world that you can’t afford and that you’re not part of. This is a white world in a city that has a 60 to 70 percent immigrant population, and a bourgeois world that is beyond the reach of 95 percent of Marseille’s population.
Grand Salon du Musée Grobet Labadié © Musées de Marseille. Photo: Bonnet Magellan.

Because Manifesta 13 was always supposed to be centered on local engagement, how important is it that the opening did not happen as originally planned, with the art world passing through in droves on preview days?
I find it really liberating. There will be successive openings until October 9 of the different “plots” as successive openings. Because of this, you avoid international tourism, which is not very possible at the moment anyways, but we also avoid it also because people will not travel to Marseille just to see one venue. The international audience can only see everything complete after October 9. Until then, the successive openings are for local audiences who are therefore the first ones to see everything.
Manifesta 13 engages with local activist groups and collectives that are engaged with some of the challenges Marseille faces. Could you give me an example of a pairing?
[Artist] Martine Derain is part of an activist group and has, over the years, documented the housing crisis in a neighborhood that is largely inhabited by immigrants. [Derain] traces a history of how France and many countries in postwar Europe welcomed immigrants as cheap labor and now, in a moment of scarcity, try to employ racism to essentially expel them through to mechanisms of gentrification.
Of course, this is something we’ve been highly aware of avoiding ourselves. The flip side of a biennial is contributing to rampant gentrification. We avoid actively contributing to this by not using disused buildings, but rather going right at the heart that makes the city, institutions.
There is an ecological dimension to that as well. If the infrastructure is there, why wouldn’t you use it? The other question is, why do so many institutions—not only in Marseille but across the world—operate only for a very small fraction of the population? If go into any museums here, it is a predominantly white, middle-class audience. Why are more voices not represented within those contexts? So the question is: what does a civic institution of tomorrow look like, and how can we therefore evolve our democracy?
“The Park: Becoming a Body of Water” opens at the Musée des Beaux arts Palais Longchamp on September 25.. Photo: CMoirenc.

So how are you working against that with your programming?
For example, our colleagues in the educational program worked in the lead up to the openings with privately owned archives. There is, for example, an archive of queer sexuality that is privately owned, run in a little townhouse, and it has been collecting material since the 1950s. These kinds of archives were made visible in the lead-up to the main program and equally informed our process.
Then, simply by looking at the social archeology of those different institutions and introducing those institutions with different voices that are normally excluded, and revealing their inherent structure of inclusion and exclusion, we hope what is represented relates differently—maybe even better—to the real lived experiences of people in Marseille.
Representation alone cannot be enough anymore. There is a huge difference between saying the right thing and doing the right thing. If we want to dismantle structurally unjust conditions of which institutions are a part, we cannot do that merely representing those conditions. We also going must call out some of the institutional lies. I think that that is the learning curve after the murder of George Floyd, combined with the pandemic, that has been revealed to all of us.
Why do we continue and not abandon ship in the time of a pandemic? Money could arguably be spent somewhere else, rather than on a biennial. But we felt that a lot of the issues we were discussing prior to the crisis have only been amplified through the crisis. In many ways, the crisis was already here. Everything then became more poignant or more visible and more apparent.
If everyone looks back at February 2020, we were all exhausted, right? We were feeding a machine that exhausted us all. In that scheme of exhaustion, we created the virus that made us all stop. The virus is a great connector because it connects us all, which is why the face mask issue has been so politicized. If you wear a mask, it’s also an act of solidarity with your neighbors. It’s interesting that [people in the] most aggressive neoliberal economies, namely the UK and the US, have such a problem with wearing them. They also have, consequently, higher fatality rate, which says how they value human life of the disenfranchised, the elderly, the sick.
A Model Childhood (2018/ 2020) © Ken Okiishi. Photo: © Jeanchristophe Lett. Courtesy Manifesta.

Did any of the artists want to alter their works because the virus and the global issues that emerged in 2020?
Ken Okiishi, for example, offered a contribution about his experience as an Asian-American. He always found it so racist that people were laughing that he was wearing already a mask during travel.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz, who is of Polish descent and was raised in postwar France before he migrated to London in the mid-1970s, was supposed to have the entire Musée Cantini. But because Mark has emphysema and is ill, since March he can only go alone in the streets at 5AM in his neighborhood. This would have been his biggest project in France in his lifetime, but it could not be made. Instead, he made a work about not being able to participate, which is a historical work that has been reframed. It is called Here and There. It asks what constitutes here and what constitutes there.
If Palermo was about coexistence, then the question here is not only how can we coexist but how can we build new forms of relationships and a new sense of community. How can we rediscover what unites us? A pandemic is quite a contributing aspect to rethink what brings us together, and what mutual care, and responsibility means.
Can you walk me through your personal highlights of the show?
There is for example, a work on view by Cameron Rowland that is a device that is used in America to surveil people that are on probation. For them, home has become most of their prison cell. The architecture of those devices, though digital and wireless, is reminiscent of the devices that were used to confine them.
There is also the painting Radieuse by Jana Euler that was painted in Marseille when she had a residency here. It depicts the Cité Radieuse, a housing project in Marseille by Le Corbusier, with two camels sitting lying in front of the building. It alludes to the colonial aspects of modernism, which exploited the aesthetics of North African architecture and culture while using North Africa as a testing ground for building projects, etc.
Martine Darien is part of a collective who photographed the houses in Rue d’Aubagne, the street on which the buildings collapsed. You have the old mansions holding treasures of the families’ art holdings, and a picture of a different social reality, a five minute walk away.
We are also showing Oral Futures Booth / Cabine des futurs  by Black Quantum Futurism, a Philadelphia-based collective active in questions of social housing. They installed a booth where people can recall what home means to them. Across the house from there, they built a public stage to be used for local musicians and collectives as a quasi-Afrofuturist time machine. It questions the notion of linear time and how it conditions the perception of social realities as unchangeable.
Radieuse (2016) © Jana Euler. Photo: © Jeanchristophe Lett/Manifesta.

Is there is the hope, like at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, to leave behind a legacy or a structure that can be self-sustaining?
I think it works on different levels. People that work in museums may learn that their institution could also be something else, and can evolve from what it currently is—that democracy and institutions are not something static.
There are different initiatives that run parallel to the exhibition, including the People’s Assembly, which includes a hundred people randomly drawn from the population to discuss issues that matter to the city. This initiative by Hedwig Fijen is the first time that Manifesta did something like this, but I think it is planned to continue in other cities.
Considering the political shifts that we just witness through this election, I think we can positively contribute to that and embrace a more civic approach to institutional politics. There are some really fortunate coincidences that I hope makes people in city politics, but also those people for whom these institutions were made for in the first place, see value in them and see that they can evolve, and that they can see themselves in them.
Manifesta 13 Marseille runs until November 29 at various locations.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, the curator of the second Riga biennale, RIBOCA2, labored for two years with her team to mount an exhibition whose topic would be, in a nutshell, finding hope in the face of the end of the world. They did not expect that a mere two months before the biennial’s opening they would actually face the end of the world—or at least the world as they knew it.
The original format of the exhibition, which had been slated to open across several locations in the Latvian capital this past May, was thrown out the window as the Baltic country went into lockdown on March 13. Plans kept morphing as the days went by, but it soon became painfully clear that gatherings and travel would be impossible.
“But we knew this exhibition had to open this year,” RIBOCA2’s executive director, Anastasia Blokhina told journalists during a preview. “The show was about what was happening in the world!”
Her hope became a reality. The young biennial, once a stop along what would have been a clogged art calendar, now stands out as one of the lone events to take place in a year of cancelations and dashed plans. The biennial finally opened to the public in a much reduced and altered format on August 20, with members of the art world gathering at a defunct and dilapidated industrial site by Riga’s port.
The necessarily curbed ambitions of the biennial did not stop artists coming up with incisive reinventions for their planned pieces. As countries around Europe teeter towards another alarming uptick in infection rates heading into fall, RIBOCA’s title, “and suddenly it all blossoms,” hints at optimism—though Lamarche-Vadel that it contains ambiguity as well: “But what does this ‘it’ refer to?”
Nikolay Smirnov, Religious Libertarians (2020). Commissioned by the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, RIBOCA. Photo by Hedi Jaansoo. Courtesy of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Curating with Covid-19
“I have to acknowledge Covid-19 as my co-curator,” Lamarche-Vadel quipped during the press preview, referring not only to the many ways in which the artworks have been altered, but also to how differently they may be interpreted. The biennial, originally planned to run for five months, will remain on view for three weeks only.
To compensate for the reduced duration, and capture the collision of its curatorial concept with reality, Lamarche-Vadel enlisted acclaimed Latvian film director Dāvis Sīmanis to produce a feature-length film on the show, with an original score by up-and-coming musician and producer Lafawndeh. The goal is to circulate it in the major film festivals and, hopefully, hold public screenings next spring and summer—abiding by whatever safety restrictions regarding large gatherings will make up the new normal by then, of course. 
That RIBOCA2 could welcome visitors at all has largely to do with the fact that Latvia, and the Baltic region in general, reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic swiftly and uncompromisingly: the country went into full lockdown 11 days after the coronavirus had been confirmed to have arrived there, and reopened in late June. So far, less than 1,500 infections and 30 coronavirus-related deaths have been recorded. That good behavior certainly paid off in some respects for the biennial’s crisis planning: though the biennial consists of 85 percent new commissions, 60 percent of the artists are based in the Baltic region.
RIBOCA2 port building venue at Andrejsala. Photos by Elena Kononova.

A Balancing Act
But the Baltic nations’ precautionary measures were not the only reason why the opening was possible. Lamarche-Vadel, who is the director of the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, had already shaped the curatorial concept around imagining new ways of being in the world, focusing on the preservation of resources and the abandonment of extractive industries. Most of the 48 participating artists’ works were originally planned to be produced locally rather than shipped across the globe. By the time lockdown had been enforced, several of the works were ready. 
Pieces that couldn’t be shipped were adapted to the new conditions. Ugo Rondinone’s wall installation Life Time, from the artist’s series of larger-than-life neon “rainbow poems,” didn’t make it over from Switzerland. Instead, it was recreated locally with plywood, and painted the colors of the rainbow flag on-site. It hangs over a small doorway cut into a brick wall in an enormous hangar, like an inscription over a gateway to the biennial’s sprawling post-industrial site.
Behind that wall, US artist Bridget Polk presents an arrangement of temporary sculptures. As its title suggests, the installation Balancing Rocks and Rubble is made of rocks and construction debris stacked on top of each other without using glue or any reinforcement other than gravity. Potentially unstable, the enchanting formations could collapse at any moment.
About a decade ago, Polk received the moniker “Rock Lady” as fans would gather to watch her balance rocks along the banks of the Hudson River. Recovering from addiction at the time, stacking became a meditative practice for her. She’s one of the few artists who traveled to Riga from the United States (an odyssey involving many stops and emergency calls to the Latvian team at every border) and here she will continue to stack—or sometimes purposely topple over—heavy rubble collected on location for the next three weeks.
Daina Taimiņa Dreams and Memories (2020). Commissioned by the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, RIBOCA2. Photo by Heidi Jaansoo. Courtesy of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art.

New Ecosystems
Today, stray cats and street dogs roam the abandoned industrial complex, Andrejsala, its grounds overgrown with wild weeds and plants. Some of the biennial’s works pay tribute to the flora and fauna. Vija Enina, a Latvian herbalist, seed bombed the premises in late winter. As visitors walk through the open-air section of the show, they might notice the aromatic verdure sprouting from the cracks in the asphalt.
Elsewhere, a pack of dogs replaces the humans who were supposed to be cast for Dora Budor’s work, now retitled In The Year Of (companion piece). The artist had intended to direct a group of “extras” to gather at random, as a nod to the dystopian site’s cinematic qualities. Now, four-legged creatures gather around a trainer with a bag of treats.
Meanwhile, Danish artist Nina Beier’s installation Total Loss includes two marble lions, of the variety found in entrances to neo-classical mansions, lying on their side. Milk, an offering for the site’s feral cats, is regularly poured into the statues’ crevices. The use of milk is telling: our economies are designed to milk every resource; factory farming and dairy production are among the highest sources of CO2 emissions.
But there’s more to the allegory of Total Loss. Beier’s installation was accompanied by a one-time performance on August 22, in which Range Rovers, parked outside the port building, offer shelter for a group of pregnant women. This pairing of one of the most wasteful vehicles ever designed and women about to bring children into an overpopulated world could be read as a comment on the bleak future of a human race obsessed with market growth.
Augustas Serapinas, Mudmen (2020). Commissioned by the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. RIBOCA2. Photo by Hedi Jaansoo. Courtesy of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art.

To be sure, the adaptability of artists and the art world will become increasingly important in the years to come. Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas also had to deal with botched plans for his site-specific installation for the biennial, but not because of the pandemic. He initially devised a plan to hang around snowy parks with a group of assistants and wait for people to build snowmen and then scoop up the icy creations, sneak them into van, and scan them to be replicated in other materials before returning them to their original spots.
But it never snowed in Latvia due to record-high temperatures that hit Europe this year, and so Serapinas’s legion of Mudmen—a multitude of bulbous stacks of mud and hay—stand in their place. It’s an important reminder of what Lamarche-Vadel was already chipping away at before the pandemic brought it all into focus: Covid-19 may be an agitator, but the old world was already slipping away. It’s high time to imagine a new one. 
RIBOCA2, “and suddenly it all blossoms,” is on view at Andrejsala, Riga from 20 August through 13 September, 2020.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More