An early version of “Dovecote,” an almost wordless short film directed by Marco Perego for exhibition at the Biennale, has a scene that follows a man in uniform as he steers a motorboat one morning in Venice. The city displays its glories, with palace and domed churches reflected in the canals, a blue sky above. The film switches to black and white as the action moves inside a building less ornate than the ones the man has boated past, but grand, even so. It is his workplace, the Giudecca women’s prison.
Perego said in a phone interview that he wanted to contrast “the beauty of Venice, one of the most beautiful places in the world, then this silent place inside.” He added: “I wanted to ask what freedom means.”
Once in prison, the film focuses on an unnamed character played by Perego’s wife, actress Zoe Saldaña, who is set to be released that day. Her companions are played by 20 real prisoners.
During the Biennale, the film will be exhibited in the prison’s visiting room, in its context Vatican Pavilion, which is hosted throughout the building. The show will also feature works in various media by nine other artists, presented in spaces such as the prison yards, the chapel and the cafeteria.
The Holy See first participated in the Biennale in 2013, but this is the first year it has been shown in the prison. Pope Francis is expected to be the first Pope to visit the Biennaledescending by helicopter in the prison yard on April 28 before heading to Piazza San Marco to celebrate Mass, according to Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the prefect who heads the Vatican’s department of culture and education.
In an email, Giovanni Russo, head of the Penitentiary Administration Department at the Italian Justice Ministry, said he was approached to host the Vatican Pavilion by the cardinal, who is also a poet and essayist. Rousseau explained: “When the cardinal made this proposal to us, I said to myself, I would be committing a sin, I would be violating my duties as a judge, if I did not immediately accept this request.”
With My Eyes is the title of the pavilion, curated by Bruno Racine, the director of the Palazzo Grassi museum in Venice, and Chiara Parisi, the director of the Center Pompidou-Metz. “It conveys the message that we should not only be spectators, but also witnesses,” Racine wrote in an email. He later explained, “The viewer is passive, while a witness conveys a message after seeing it.”
One piece, by Syrian-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal, places excerpts from pieces written by prisoners on slabs of hardened lava. One reads, in Italian, “In this place, there is no armor.” Another work features portraits of prisoners as girls and young women by French painter Claire Tabouret, based on photographs provided to her. French hip-hop choreographer Bidou Dembele has created a dance that will be performed, in part, by prisoners. Inmates will also serve as cadets, leading visitors through the exhibits. (Guards also play a role: Visitors leave their cell phones with a guard upon entry, and guards escort visitors and inmates throughout the facility.)
About 80 prisoners live in the Giudecca, and Racine estimated that almost all of them would participate in the exhibition in one way or another.
The building’s past lives are also featured in some of the works on display. Built in the 13th century, the building became a monastery in the 16th century and then a hospital in the early 19th century when the French ruled Venice. It was then a military prison under the Austrians later that century, before becoming a civil prison under the Italians in 1900.
The current name of the building, the Convertitespeaks of the conversion of some prostitutes who took holy orders, according to Dennis Romano, author of “Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City.” In a telephone interview, he said: “It was a convent dedicated to Mary Magdalene, which, of course, made perfect sense for an institution for reformed prostitutes, which moved sometime in the 1540s. By 1562, it had become a closed order, from where they should not have left.”
For the Vatican Pavilion, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes plans to hang one of her fabrics high in the chapel where some of the prisoners worship, sticking it between the balconies and the confessionals. She explained in a statement that she hoped to connect “the site’s original function, the baroque convent for ‘reconverted’ women with the current life of the prison house and the stories of women from around the world.”
In Perego’s film, the camera visits another of the spaces used by the prisoners, the dormitory, where Saldaña’s character and an incarcerated friend share a wordless farewell on a camp bed. Saldaña said: “You wonder are they lovers, are they sisters, are they best friends. There’s love, there’s a bond, and there’s a sadness in knowing they’re not going to be together again.”
Perego said, “When we were driving, I said, ‘Think you’re leaving home.’ Surrounded by real prisoners, Saldaña’s character revisits familiar places, such as the home’s sewing room, where she has worked, and the shower. ; she takes her coat from the guard. and she enters an arched courtyard, where – from a balcony – women look out at her and bang their tin mugs on a ledge to celebrate her release.
The Biennale exhibition will also highlight some aspects of how the Italian authorities run this prison. “To exhibit in a prison is to show a reality that is foreign to most people, who would never enter this space if they were not drawn to the artworks,” Parisi wrote in an email.
The penitentiary also has gardens, and organic produce grown there by inmates (who are paid for their work) is sold to the public, and home-made toiletries find their way into the bathrooms of some of Venice’s top hotels. A local group of volunteers, Rio Terà dei Pensieri, helped start these businesses.
“There is a real tradition of paternalism in Venetian philanthropy,” Romano said. “The charities of the period when this monastery was founded believed that you should give people a trade.”
Another nod to the institution’s past is the inclusion of silkscreens by Corita Kent, a longtime Catholic nun and progressive activist who died in 1986. In an email, Parisi said Kent’s work was included for the combination of “sacred texts. poetry, statements and pop images, in works that challenge convention’.
Kent’s appearance in the Vatican show represents a posthumous restoration after, during her lifetime, an American cardinal, James McIntyre, denounced her silkscreens as blasphemous.
Another artist in the show, Maurizio Cattelan, caused controversy in Catholic circles with a work he did in 1999, a statue of Pope John Paul II that fell from a meteorite. Cattelan’s contribution to the Vatican Pavilion is a sculpture of another person on the ground, an unidentified man, sleeping on the pavement with a dog for a companion.
The decision to extensively involve inmates in most of the projects in this exhibit, Racine said, was made after consultation with a prison psychologist. “The project is a unique opportunity for prisoners to receive a form of recognition,” he wrote in an email. “The project aims to recognize the dignity of prisoners without forgetting that these women are serving long sentences.”
Perego said he and his co-screenwriter, Alexandros Dinelaris, named their short film “Pigeon House” after the traditional small houses built for domesticated pigeons. Perego compared the prisoners to these birds, noting that both often go unnoticed. “When you interview the majority of these women, outside, they feel completely invisible,” she said.
A few weeks after her visit for the shoot, Saldaña recalled, “The inmates aren’t allowed to have cell phones, so the moment they saw me with my cell phone, they kept saying, ‘Take a picture.’ Not only take a picture with me, but also me. They want to be seen, they want to be remembered.”