La Biennale di Venezia
Swiss Pavilion 2024
The Swiss Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, presents the exhibition “Super Superior Civilizations” by Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor, curated by Andrea Bellini.
The Swiss Pavilion exhibition presents the sixth and seventh chapters of Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s monumental “Superfictional World Atlas” saga: The Miracle of Helvetia and Roma Talismano. The “Superfictional World Atlas” is a worldwide cartographic project, allegorical in nature and potentially infinite in scope, which the artist has been dedicated to for nearly two decades. Through his studies and research in experimental architecture, Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s artistic practice questions the relationship between urban space and collective imagination, between architecture and ideology, and between political propaganda and national identity.
In the Swiss Pavilion, Guerreiro aims at creating the most complex and ambitious installation of his career so far: a total, immersive work of art, littered with classical architectural elements — artificial symbols of an assumed Western racial superiority. Columns, fountains, and capitals, along with large surfaces of fake marble textures, suggest an imagery of power and supremacy and serve as the backdrop for the Pavilion’s two main installations.
The Miracle of Helvetia, a video that stages a grand allegory of Switzerland, represented as a miraculous and “super-fictional” paradise on earth, in which nature and technology, capitalism and democracy, rusticity and sophistication are in perfect and surreal balance. A long corridor connects The Miracle of Helvetia with the installation Roma Talismano, an allegorical entity and phantasmagorical twin of Roman civilization, as well as a symbol — through the centuries — of a supposed moral, political and cultural superiority. Brazilian artist and singer Ventura Profana embodies the Capitoline wolf, a symbolic and phantasmagorical animal, that sings a song narrating the exploits of three allegorical animals: the she-wolf, the ewe lamb and the eagle. By being mythical figures in the constitution of white identity and its imagined superiority, the wolf is the universal mother from whom the superior people descend; the eagle is the symbol of Roman war supremacy; and the lamb embodies, in Christian Rome, the very idea of purity and innocence.
