LA BOEMIA STA SUL MARE
Practising discontinuity, imagining otherwise
In a present marked by uncertainty, our relationship with time becomes unstable: instead of opening up as a horizon of possibilities, the future is perceived as a broken promise; the past, invested with reparative and nostalgic expectations, returns instead as a space for projection and refuge. In this retroversion, it becomes urgent to question not only what we look at, but also the ways in which time is conceived and experienced, questioning the use of nostalgia as a form of orientation and as an automatic response to the instability of the present.
In the hegemony of nostalgia that permeates politics, the media and lifestyles, the past is frequently mobilised as a reassuring image to return to or as a model to imitate in order to escape the complexity of the present. Through the selection and idealisation of what has been, nostalgia acts as a device that decides what can be remembered, simplifies conflicts, normalises fractures and narrows the field of what can be imagined. By saturating the imagination, it offers the illusion of shelter and, at the same time, contributes to creating a climate in which uncertainty and anxiety become easily mobilisable resources for collective orientation.
In a climate marked by antagonism and resentment, anxiety acts as a technology of government, capable of making subjects more obedient, blackmailable and manipulable, placing the future itself in quarantine and depriving it of the possibility of being conceived. It is from this impasse that nostalgia can be counter-appropriated: not as a desire to return, but as a gesture that looks back in order to restore, or sometimes give for the first time, space and visibility to what has been selectively left on the margins of hegemonic narratives. It is in this reopening that time begins to move again, making the idea of a future that is not already prescribed feasible.
Today, hope can be understood as a movement that does not avoid obstacles while waiting for a better outcome, but rather embraces them as a condition for the possibility of another gesture. Rejecting both evasion and adaptation, hope does not promise solutions, but introduces a deviation. As in Dick Fosbury's jump, it looks at the obstacle, runs towards it, challenges it and, for a moment, turns its back on it in order to overcome it. This unexpected movement affirms, in its interruption, the urgency of changing the point of view from which we approach the contemporary world. This twist becomes a tool capable of introducing discontinuity into a linear time perceived as indomitable, counteracting a condition of reflective impotence that has become systemic and endemic.
Hope ceases to be a projection into the future and asserts itself as a situated act: a practice that restores complexity and depth to the present and offers a strategy for staying with the problem. Far from any promise of salvation or resolution, it manifests itself as an attitude that accepts opacity, contradiction and incompleteness not as flaws to be overcome, but as conditions to work with. Hope does not indicate a way out, but rather a way of pausing on the threshold, transforming uncertainty from a paralysing limitation into a field of operational possibilities.
As in Dick Fosbury's jump, hope does not circumvent the obstacle: it takes it as a pivot around which to articulate a movement that proves to be emancipatory. It changes its structure, activating a counterintuitive gesture that does not erase the threshold, but crosses it along a trajectory that was previously unthinkable. In this shift, hope generates a break in the status quo, creating the conditions for practices capable of misaligning, deviating and reorienting the present.
The fifth edition of the International Women's Biennial takes shape in the fracture through which the rays of nostalgia pierce the present. In this fissure, the Biennial interposes a lens capable of reorienting the gaze, rewriting the cartography of Today and reactivating what the imagination had left unresolved. It is from this threshold that the title of the edition takes shape.
Bohemia stands on the sea emerges as a figure through which to question the relationship between utopia, time and imagination. Rather than indicating a geographical paradox, the title refers to a constellation of thought that runs through William Shakespeare, is taken up by Franz Fühmann and finds decisive expression in Ingeborg Bachmann. In this trajectory, Bohemia is not configured as a destination or a promise of salvation, but as an elsewhere conceivable only in its instability: a fictitious horizon, fragile and never fully graspable, which makes the imagination of another condition practicable. It is precisely in this tension that Bohemia asserts itself as a critical device, capable of reactivating the very idea of an alternative and of cracking what, in the present, appears inevitable.
Far from any idea of return or restoration, La Boemia sta sul mare intends to investigate forms of memory and memorialisation that operate through fragments and new wholes, partial returns and reactivations. Through artistic practices that work on missing archives, broken genealogies, surviving gestures and unfulfilled possibilities, the Biennale becomes a space where memory is translated into action. Not as an exercise in repetition, but as a practice capable of recovering what has been denied or interrupted, of recomposing relationships and restoring complexity to simplified stories, so that what has been is not reproduced, but put under tension and transformed in its very making.
From this perspective, the present opens up as a field of tensions within which to articulate policies for the future, based not on the promise of progress, but on caring for the present: on rebuilding trust, on vulnerability, on the ability to dwell in uncertainty. Policies that involve the recomposition of sensitivity, slowing down, poetry, the body, and that open up new forms of emotional and linguistic autonomy.
The challenge lies in interrupting the race, escaping the illusions of modernity and linear progress. It is a gesture that rejects anticipation as a form of governing time and requires attention, care and the renunciation of easy promises of salvation. In this pause, in slowing down and staying put, it becomes possible to learn to find one's bearings without fixed maps and to recognise the latent potential in lingering. It is from here that it becomes possible to believe that Bohemia lies by the sea.
Biblioteca Effimera
A Library for the Time Being
a temporary ecology of shared knowledge
Conceived as a living organism and a contemporary commons, this ephemeral library is a temporary space for the circulation of knowledge that exists only through use, encounter and exchange. Rather than preserving information, it activates it; rather than accumulating content, it exposes knowledge to transformation, friction and loss.
Active exclusively for the duration of the Biennale, A Library for the Time Being rejects the logic of the archive as a place of stabilisation, authority and possession. Unlike a traditional library, knowledge is not treated as a resource to be stored or extracted, nor to be standardised or reproduced: knowledge is rather configured as a situated, partial, vulnerable and relational practice. Texts, voices, notes, fragments, signs and contributions of different kinds, formats and media coexist in an unstable ecology, in which meaning is never fixed but constantly negotiated.
This space does not aspire to presumed neutrality or taken-for-granted inclusivity: it recognises asymmetries, gaps and disagreements as constituent elements of any shared field of knowledge. Contributing to it is not defined by competence, but by participation, just as value emerges from circulation rather than accumulation. By questioning institutionalised hierarchies of competence and authorship, A Library for the Time Being privileges use over possession, relationship over authority, exchange over preservation.
Embracing its own temporality and fragility, A Library for the Time Being adopts ephemerality as a stance through which to question the policies that gravitate around knowledge and its circulation. What is at stake is not what will remain, but what can be activated in the present: encounters between artists and the public, between the human and the more-than-human, between different forms of language and vocabularies, between lived experience and speculative thought. A space for peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge, where heterogeneous contributions can find a place and cooperate within a knowledge bank that draws strength from the awareness of its own temporal limitations. In this sense, the library does not function as a repository, but as a threshold: an environment where knowledge is questioned, revisited and, for a limited time, shared.
SELECTED ARTISTS 5TH EDITION
Gaia Aducchio, Karina Akopyan, Aliteia (Alice Bambolin), Anastasiia Artiukhina, Beatrice Bartolozzi, Franca Bertani, Letizia Carattini, Chiara Anna Colombo, Marina Comerio, Tiziana Contu, Martina Dallastella, Marie-José D’Aprile, Marija Delić, Donatella Donatelli, Elisabetta Eleutieri Serpieri, Fabiola Faidiga, Claire Farruggia, Marica Fasoli, Kikki Ghezzi, Monica Gorini, Valentina Grilli, Barbara Grossato, Kerry Jane Lowery, Paulina Jazvić, Sofia MacGregor Oettler, Micol Magni, Eliana Marinari, Pamela Martinez Rod, Maria Cristina Marzola, Yasmin Noorbakhsh, Viviana Rasulo, Giorgia Razzetta, Ann Russell, Claudia Villani, Ana Vivoda.
GUEST ARTISTS
Veronica Barbato, Noemi Biasetton, Francesca Centonze, Luisa Elia, Arianna Giorgi, Silvia Giordani, Francesca Pionati, Marta Ravasi, Laura Russell, Vittoria Serena (Claudia Zaggia), Andrea Solaja, Sarah Staton, Vivianne van Singer, Sarah Kate Wilson, Alba Zari.
Riccardo Rizzetto
Invited Curator
Riccardo Rizzetto is an Italian curator, researcher and artist based in London, working between Italy and the United Kingdom. An Italian curator trained as an architect, Riccardo Rizzetto develops a post-disciplinary practice that spans curatorial research, installation, writing and collective formats. His work investigates ecological, cultural and political transformations, exploring how spatial and material gestures can redefine territories and systems of representation.
Riccardo Rizzetto studied architecture at IUAV University of Venice and subsequently at the Royal College of Art. He obtained an MA in Research Architecture from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he collaborated as a research assistant with Forensic Architecture, participating in investigations such as Cartography of Genocide and The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation.
His long-term research project Eroded Ecologies places Riccardo Rizzetto at the forefront of the contemporary debate on hydrofeminism and theories of the more-than-human. Through this research, he analyses lagoon and coastal landscapes as co-authorial environments, shaped by human and non-human agencies, investigating how crops, soils and infrastructures can act as territorial sensors.
Riccardo Rizzetto is co-founder and curator of Communal Matters, a research platform that explores human and more-than-human communities through spatial and material practices.
As Invited Lead Curator of the International Women's Biennial, Riccardo Rizzetto develops a curatorial framework that conceives the exhibition as a critical threshold; a space capable of questioning fixed identities and activating plurality, dissonance and new imaginaries.
BID - Biennale Internazionale Donna
Iscrizione al n. 1515 del Registro regionale delle associazioni di promozione sociale di cui all’articolo 20 della L.R. 23/2012
MAIN EXHIBITION \ TRIESTE
Magazzino 26 \ Porto Vecchio
Thursday and Sunday \ 10:00 – 19:00 Friday and Saturday \ 10:00 – 20:00
SATELLITE PROJECT \ SISTIANA
Porto piccolo Art Gallery + Spazio O2
Friday to Sunday \ 15.00 – 20.00
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