[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_24

The nomad: diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, Isabelle Eberhardt, 1895 - 1904

Isabelle Eberhardt's stories are so distant from all the travel narratives of her time that they leave me speechless. I bought the collection of her writings convinced that I already knew what I would find inside: the usual clichés or, in the words of Edward Said, the usual "orientalisms." But it wasn't like that. Eberhardt's eye saw with the heart; she was a pen full of intimacy and confessions. Her prose was poetry: it was made of images, sounds, colors, perfumes. And on every page, something overbearingly sincere still whispered in our melancholy ear.

Disguised as a Bedouin, posing as a man, Isabelle Eberhardt traveled around North Africa admired Islamic culture, learned Arabic, and then she went on to live with the Tuareg, choosing to die among them. Her was not the admiration of Western people wanted a different world that they felt was exotic and fascinating but, at the same time, inferior. Her gaze was full of curiosity and research. The journey of discovery of North Africa was a journey of self-discovery. There was never judgment in her words or comparison. There was discretion, listening, and suspension. I thought of her when I visited the 2024 Venice Biennale.

She would have well represented this year's theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”: a Swiss of Russian origins, she chose Africa as her home. A rare example of a white Western person, she spoke of "oriental" without “orientalism.” While the Biennale, riding the ever-growing wave of postcolonial and gender studies, wanted to show itself beyond a white supremacist past, it presents itself as the apotheosis of the Colonial Museum.

The 2024 Exhibition is dedicated to cultural, ethnic, and sexual "minorities," but what is perceived is not a balanced integration, an all-encompassing and multi- perspective gaze, and sincere attention towards artistic production. What we perceive is that we are taking a Grand Tour among the "freak" representations of the world, a sort of Safari, where we can find the artist of the unknown indigenous tribe and the marginalized transsexual artist finally getting some global attention. The production of authors belonging to discriminated cultures is presented under an ethnological, not artistic, eye; the female gender is presented as a minority; sexual complexity as diversity. Whoever oversaw the event said, "This year, let's pay attention to all those who have been cut off from History so they stop making so much noise. And next year, we can all return to minding our business as always, but with our hearts at peace."

In this Biennale, there is a desperate need to feel "absolved." It is a bit like when After leaving the restaurant, you give some change to the person begging. This need can be felt from the type of attention that the Exhibition assigns, not to the individual artist's work as a production of value but to what or who that artist represents. It's like reading Isabelle Eberhardt not because she had a pure gaze and a voice that has survived time but because she was a strange girl who dressed as a man, and maybe she was gay, who knows.

This is not inclusion; it is dehumanization, again. The message is wrong: we must not give a voice to those who do not have one. Because we all have a voice, but remember that this voice is not allowed to be heard because a system is screaming around it. These artists are not exposed because they are minorities but to remind us that what is a minority - and what is not - has been decided by another “minority.” which has the power to define meanings and values.

The Biennale says, "Hey, you see that here we are open to the Different." and in doing so, it shows how rooted it is and how much it believes in the binary concept of "Normality" and “Normativity.”