120 Landscape theorised by Gilles Clément and made up of «undecided spaces which it is difficult to lay a name on. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out». For Berlinde De Bruyckere, art is the dwelling able to give refuge, to give shelter, as in the title of these pas de deux between art and rights and in the very title of City of Refuge, the series of exhibitions named after a Nick Cave song that De Bruyckere brings around the world – third, current stop in the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, as part of the collateral exhibitions of the 60th Biennale of Contemporary Art – whose guardians are her transient Arcangeli, genderless icons from long before the word existed and figures equally suspended, on tiptoe, between collapse and decollapse, whose weight of their mission of shelter and comfort lies latent on their bruised bodies. It is precisely in her bodies that lies a great lesson in respect. A lesson I would like to introduce to you by telling you a story: when studying the Canaki population of New Caledonia colonised by France, the anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt (1878-1954) told of the time he asked a Canaki elder what was the most remarkable discovery that France had brought them and the elder, after much reflection, replied «The body». The Canaki felt that they belonged to the world without any separation from it to the extent that, at every birth, they buried the placenta of the newborn life under a newly planted tree: looking at a forest, thus, a Canaki saw not only trees but lives, regardless of their bark/skin. It is the same attitude of respect for life, regardless of the body shell, that De Bruyckere puts into art. Her works come to light before our eyes. When all her sculptures – from the cages of the Closet Forms of the 1980s, to the more recent Arcangeli, to the skins of human of horse of tree cured by her anti-art – are placed next to each other, the perception of redemption and rebirth is impetuous. In her lacerated forms we recognise that fissure from which we ourselves are born, which allows birth to become an act of creation. Bodies with no beginning and no end, whose monumentality of volume is effective in becoming a greater sounding board of her message of hope, and her call for understanding and respect. This is why De Bruyckere chooses horses, whose hides she retrieves from slaughterhouses and cures with wax and epoxy, entrusting their guiltlessness and stateliness with the need to stop all war. This is why De Bruyckere chooses trees, the trunks and branches of which she salvages from disaster-stricken areas and cures with wax, cushions and velvets, entrusting their guiltlessness and stateliness with the need to actively arrest the climate crisis. And this is why De Bruyckere moulds sublime bodies – sub-limen, on the threshold – unattributable to a specific gender or age, layering them in wax and supporting them with an invisible iron soul, entrusting their innocence and their 1:1 scale with the need to awaken in us the sharing of a human condition that may throw off exclusivist labels. By virtue of the universal nature of her bodies, her work has been read in turn as an antispeciesist, environmentalist, LGBTQIA+, childhood and old age, asylum and disability manifesto, which cannot but embody an absolute truth: in the detonation of the albeit legitimate claims that crowd an atomised and potentially deflagrating, like an atomic bomb, social fabric, the solution would simply lie in respect for life as such – which also means respect for the choice of self-determination – from the gender transition encapsulated in the words of Almodóvar's Agrado in All About My Mother: «You are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being,» to abortion up to the third month, when nerve cells begin to develop and existentially life can begin to be called life, to the euthanasia of a suffering body whose end it is not only disrespectful, but above all outrageous that anyone else may decree.
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