Basin of San Marco: The Union of Comoros. The Union of Comoros presents Djahazi a project by Paolo W. Tamburella, outside the Giardini, in the Basin of san Marco. Within his ongoing interest and research on modernity and postcolonial conditions Paolo W. Tamburella’s project addresses, indirectly and poetically, how the forced integration of national markets into the world system has led to the disappearance of national subsistence and given rise to new froms of dependency and cultural loss and erosion. He centers his project on the Djahazi, the Comoro Islands’ traditional vessels, which were used to transport slave traders in past centuries.
Seen outside the Giardini. Paolo W. Tamburella stands in front of his Djahazi installation. He has fixed and restored the boat, but not as an antiquarian and nostalgic affectation. On the contrary, in Venice, this vessel, which is loaded with the regular shipping containers used in most of today’s trade, stands as a metaphor for the ambivalent globality, bringing together hope and despair, hyper-rationalism and avant-garde extravagance, anti-modern nostalgia and exuberant narratives of progress, emergence and emergency, in a sort of cautionary tale about the new forms of the expendable in a world of uncertainty and transition still under the sway of political and mercantile liberalism.
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Seen outside the Giardini. Paolo W. Tamburella stands in front of his Djahazi installation. He has fixed and restored the boat, but not as an antiquarian and nostalgic affectation. On the contrary, in Venice, this vessel, which is loaded with the regular shipping containers used in most of today’s trade, stands as a metaphor for the ambivalent globality, bringing together hope and despair, hyper-rationalism and avant-garde extravagance, anti-modern nostalgia and exuberant narratives of progress, emergence and emergency, in a sort of cautionary tale about the new forms of the expendable in a world of uncertainty and transition still under the sway of political and mercantile liberalism.