Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale

Notes and images by Eliza Trefas and Florin Flueras

Florin Flueras:

Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale felt like from another universe – we were not just foreigners but aliens, coming from a parallel artworld, with different implicit references, motivations, approaches... And somehow that's the idea with Unofficial Unworks, to behave like the constraints of the art world are not there, or like they're there just to play with. It just skips implicit art world perspectives, conventions and protocols – playing its own game, using certain artworld dynamics as playfield and aiming more for playful transgressions than for institutional critique. Unofficial Unworks is alien also because it's on the side of the visitors in the art-visitors relationship. It's not so much about art objects, images or performances placed in front of our eyes, but more about how we are experiencing such things. More than retinal or conceptual is an affect based meta-art, done from the posture of visitors, and activated in their bodies.

I'm mostly interested in what is the practice behind a work, what kind of new sensibility, thinking and perspectives are necessary for producing and perceiving it, and not so much about what it is about, or by whom. In this sense I was surprised to see there a lot of self-colonizing ways of doing and presenting art. Especially the main exhibition seems to be a lot about who and what, about identity and representation, and mostly conventional image or object based works, very little anything process based, performative or meta. This is surprising also because if we take only South America, from where the curator is, there are works that can easily rewrite the history of contemporary art, truly foreign to the established ways of producing and perceiving art. In this context Unofficial Unworks felt as an even more necessary deviation from the default forms of doing, presenting and receiving art, hopefully also for the visitors that entered in contact with it.

Eliza Trefas:

Besides the conceptual leap over artworld's normal structures and protocols of validation, Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale became also a way to experience the works and exhibitions. It produced an opening in front of the works, a double reception of them, and a sense that there is a more vital connection with what is there. People stopped, looked at us with pleasure, suspicion, pleasure from suspicion, with concern, some smiling, and, rather often, suspended in an inability to fix us into any definitive position: visitors, artists, performers, something entirely else to worry about? Are they weirdly crazy or wit tricksters? Visitors as well as some of the official cameramen from the pavilions pulled out their cameras to film us. It seemed we triggered a kind of "subtle performance" for some, affecting the usual flow of the broader artworld-spectacle, interrupting the automatisms of running through the exhibition, consuming the works in a predominantly visual and intellectual manner.

In an edition of the biennale so problematic in its process of recovering art from communities marginalized till not very long ago, having a more than intellectual experience in front of a work can be considered less relevant to the current context. Thus it can feel that imposed empathy replaces the possibility of subjective experience, an empathy felt exclusively by moral duty. But what is empathy without body, without a fully embodied experience of it? To relate to art via an embodied practice is a much more awake, profound and memorable process, to constantly actualize my understanding in real time through artistic practices that create a meaningful bridge with what is being seen, recepted, encountered and how.

I shortly did 'Unexperiences' at the Austrian pavilion. I liked the exhibition - mixed, accessible but also with substance, with both older and newer works and conceptual perspectives, a mix that prevented the works from being enclosed in some mere currents or aesthetics. I was already very tired, and I found fit to continue my visit through the exhibition as almost asleep. While the body was increasingly losing balance soft and danced towards sleep, it was also paradoxically opening new relations and meanings with the surrounding works and visitors, producing that double awakening, truly seeing by way of performing. 'Love' appeared in the main exhibition next to the works of Santiago Yahuarcani. Although the artist was present, I felt that this time Unofficial Unworks could appear without deviating attention from the works, but rather stay with them, lead some attention towards them. The body got deformed, sensitized, exalted by the works, a sensibility that gradually opened towards visitors, space, my own body and then deviating performatively towards video cameras, guards, empty walls, etc.. From a busy and noisy crowd, it became focused and quiet and oscillated between humor, appreciation, confusion, sensibility.

It made sense to me that we didn't "just visit" the biennial, but we came to wittily introduce what we do, to meet art through art. Visiting the biennale was a premise to present Unofficial Unworks, and Unofficial Unworks was like an excuse to visit the biennale: for me they made sense and were only possible together. The whole trick is to trick everything, to find gaps where to insert your work both in your everyday life practice, and in this case also at important art events.

Florin Flueras, Unofficial Unworks (2019)

Unofficial Unworks are Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, Love appearing uninvited at important art events, enacted by visitor-performers, skipping and overriding structures of validation, going around gates of access, affecting implicit conventions and expectations. As visitors we usually conform, performing our roles, consuming quietly what is in front of our eyes. As artists we mostly follow art world's implicit codes, protocols and requirements, hoping to be seen, invited, appreciated. As people we conform to prevailing perspectives and certainties. Artists can and should sometimes deviate from these dynamics. Visitors too.

Performers: Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras.