Arts for Social Justice. Deconstructing Powerful Visual Regimes of Migration in 2024 Art Biennale, Venice

There is a long tradition of scholars documenting the relevance of the arts in creating the conditions of visibility for controversial pasts, inscribing the unspoken and revealing the silence in social memories. This is a consolidated tradition of critical interpretive analysis that considers structural and cultural aspects of institutions, memory and the arts, the importance of cultural forms of art in addressing that which one cannot otherwise directly address (i.e Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991; Zolberg 1995, 1998; Erll 2011; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010; Zerubavel 2007; Tota and Hagen 2016; Dekel 2013). In this paper I will present some results of the ongoing project TRAMIGRART (www.tramigrart.it) which investigates under what conditions artistic practices can contribute to the memories of migrants en route to Europe, re-elaborating the past and re-configuring the present of migrants’ experiences. It explores the relationships between arts, traumatic events, and resilience with a special focus on two different kinds of diasporic memories: a) memories of forced migration through the Mediterranean and b) memories of migrants escaping from Russia’s war on Ukraine. This project aims at producing a reflective knowledge of how dominant narratives can be subverted by alternative ways of displaying memories of forced migration and war. It analyses: a) how art can undermine the powerful visual regime of migration that is strongly established by public discourse; b) what kinds of aesthetics are applied by artists to deconstruct common ways of seeing; c) what kind of experiences of migration are addressed with what kind of aesthetic and visual strategies. Arts are considered as negotiating arena, where rights, memories, and identities are questioned and claimed. I will focus on a case study within TRAMIGRART relating to the 2024 Art Biennale “Foreigners everywhere”, the Venice exhibition which included 88 National Participations.