Bugarin + Castle

In the second week here, we move a Vaporetto ride away from Venice and start travelling to work every day across the water. After the first few rides, I stumble off the boat physically, to spend my days on land, internally swaying, asking if anyone else is and realising I’ve left brain and senses on the boat and they’re off doing the rounds of the island. Someone tells me that this is land sickness, your body struggling to readjust to solid ground after being on the water. But it’s Venice and I’m never on solid ground and worry the swaying will persist for the entire 10 weeks I’m here. Thankfully, the sensation starts to fade after about a week. I stand more firmly on the boats as they rock, I learn the routes, where not to stand, the names of the stops and start to piece together a sense of being here. It’s a dizzy place, glitz, glamour, money, yachts, swarms of tourists, palazzos, decadent free-bar opening parties and swelling queues for exhibitions across the Biennale, maybe that also contributed to the queasiness.

In the opening week of the festival, the other associates and I shuffle up to mediators working in pavilions across the city, asking, first-day of primary school-style, if they want to hang out. It starts small, with a 4 person WhatsApp group, and grows week by week. We’re 182 strong now and gather on the beach, on the wall outside the communist bar drinking €2 glasses of Prosecco, on boats without engines, in international crowds marching for Palestine, on the water front shrunk by yachts (not really grasping how high a wave has to be to soak you), sharing spare sofas when friends are locked out and still searching for a decent karaoke bar in the city. On this international stage, devastating socio-political atrocities on people and planet are grieved in exhibitions all contained on this fragile floating island in the lagoon. The buoyant vulnerability of this place alongside works which confront the vulnerability of this moment, makes stability a challenge. But the friends I have met here, like always, are what has landed me back on solid ground. Meeting other artists, learning about the places inside them, the ways the worlds they come from have shaped what they make, how they think and what matters to them is a special kind of magic, a hum through this experience which holds us steady and like Koyo Kouoh proposes, a minor key in itself.

Lily Lavorato is a Glasgow-based artist who through sculpture and writing, traces sickness through bodies, portals and landscapes often related to Calabria, where her paternal family are rooted. Lily was part of the Scotland + Venice Professional Development Programme for Shame Parade, they spent 10 weeks in Venice as one of the three Outer Spaces Senior Exhibition Associates.