Deep Routes

The first I heard of Vlatka Horvat’s idea for the Croatian Pavilion was, appropriately, through someone else. They’d bumped into her at a gig in central London by Australia’s avant-garde jazz trio, the Necks. They explained how she was going to invite artists from across the world to send a work of art to her in Venice, only the art could not be transported by an international parcel-delivery service or a fleet of corporate couriers. It had to piggyback on the journeys of friends and friends of friends, neighbours, relatives, or anyone else the artists could trust. Hearing about this felt uncanny: I had just been a node in a similar network myself.

A few months earlier, I had been sitting beside the River Lea in north London with my friend Reginaldo. We were drinking strong coffee and chatting in a mash-up of French and Portuguese peppered with the odd word of English. “Do you know anyone in Cuba?” he asked. “Someone who might be coming to London, who wouldn’t mind bringing a small box of cigars?”

My mind immediately turned to the only Cuban I’d ever known in any deep sense. He was a doctor who had worked in Angola in the late 1970s as part of the Cuban international-solidarity movement. He was sent to the northeast corner of the country to work in a small hospital. When a power struggle erupted within Angola’s ruling party, he was forced, at gunpoint, to sign death certificates for political prisoners before they were shot and thrown into a mass grave. Their cause of death was recorded as “road accident.” He watched as men and women—some, his colleagues—were executed. It broke his heart and his political faith. Whenever I hear mention of Cuba, I think of this man.

But that’s another story.

Reginaldo, who’d left Angola in the late 1970s for France and later the UK, explained that he had an old friend who rolled cigars in a small factory in Havana. He and Disney had met several years earlier when they were living as neighbours in another corner of north London (the same corner, as it turns out, in which Vlatka lives). When Disney returned to Cuba, he told Reginaldo that he would send him cigars if they could find someone to deliver them.

Reginaldo winked at me. “This is why I am asking you, Lara! You know lots of people. You must know someone who is travelling from Havana to London.”

The two of us burst out laughing—Reginaldo does suit a cigar—and I really liked the idea of being part of this impromptu scheme. I would do my best.

As the days passed, I found myself imagining Disney rolling his cigars in Havana. I’d never met the man, but I could see his nimble fingers and agile hands, his muscular forearms and soft elbows. I could smell the heat of the sun warming the building where he works. I could hear his colleagues laughing and chatting and the distinct sound of music from Mali coming from someone’s phone, the flute inflected with a Cuban rhythm. I saw Disney smiling, remembering his friend back in London.

I asked around.

Within a couple of weeks, I’d discovered that a friend of mine had a friend who had a friend who lived in Havana. He was a Welshman. He was always flying back and forth to London. He might be able to help.

Questions ensued.

“What are the cigars called?”

“What did you say his name was? Elvis? That can’t be right.”

“Perhaps it would be easier if you just gave me the brand name and I bought some before I left—or does your friend only want the ones made by Elvis?”

“And, forgive me, but why’s he called Elvis?”

“Oh, I see. I got muddled. Sorry. So why’s he called Disney?”

“And how will I know that Disney hasn’t accidentally put some weed inside the cigars?”

“How do I know if I can trust the three of you?”

I suggested he trust his instinct instead: “Go meet Disney and decide for yourself.”

Two weeks later, the cigars arrived. We all agreed that the handover would take place at a cafe in London’s Soho district. Reginaldo and I were early. We chose a table by the window, from which we could try to spot the Welshman. As it was, he wasn’t what we’d been expecting, although come to think of it, I’m not sure what we had been expecting. He was tall and slim. He wore a turquoise pullover and was holding a thick brown paper bag in both hands. He placed the package on the table between our coffees and the glossy pastries on plates. Reginaldo immediately lifted it and held it above the table, bouncing it in his fingers, as if he were trying to establish the weight of a newborn grandchild. Then he put the package on his lap and opened the bag. Inside, he found a dozen fat cigars rolled in a page torn from Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. Unwrapped, they looked to me like a bundle of dynamite, the sort you might see in a Walt Disney cartoon. Reginaldo was delighted. I think we all were.

The shared achievement felt rare. It had created a moment that we could all enjoy, a sense that—despite the immense cruelty of the world, the greed, the individualism, the fact we are facing a future that looks more dystopian by the day—we could rely on one another. There was a joy in being part of something so informal, something that didn’t require any official stamp of approval or certified guarantee. We hadn’t had to sign any forms or pay a fee to a government body or contribute to corporate profit. We hadn’t had to exploit anyone else to pull it off. All we needed was trust and generosity, to be willing to help someone else and to meet a stranger halfway. It felt liberating and fun. I dislike this word, but the truth is, it also felt empowering.

* * * *

Kish-ee-kee-la! Kish-ee-kee-la!

I first learned about quixiquila in Luanda. It was 1999. I was in the air-conditioned office of a North American man. He was sitting behind a large desk, but he looked like a folk singer or a priest. He had a tidy beard and introduced himself as a socialist. After hesitating, he said he was a developmental economist. Most people would probably have deemed him an aide worker. I remember thinking that he probably wasn’t much of a dancer and that he had very kind eyes. He appeared to be comfortable at his desk, which stretched between us like a vast American plain.

He told me that he came to Angola after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. He said he’d always wanted to be part of the movement for liberation. “I wanted to be useful,” he said.

He spoke slowly and softly, and he did not stop. He talked and talked, and I was mesmerised. He was trying to help me understand how some of the poorest people in the country were managing to survive. This is how we came to quixiquila.

No matter how bad the situation, he explained, no matter how bad the war, the economy, the heat of the sun and the strength of the rains, no matter the sheer insecurity of life here, the market traders—all women—can keep going because of quixiquila.

This is how it works. A group of people, probably no more than a dozen, agree to pool their money. Each month, everyone chips in a little. Each month, one member of the group gets all the cash. They take it in turns. There are no guarantees, no receipts or “due diligence.” Quixiquila is about sharing the struggle and sharing the survival, too. It is informal, and it is improvised. It is risky. It embodies trust and friendship.

Whenever I say the word quixiquila, I feel galvanised. It brings to mind all those Angolan women working in the markets, day in, day out, their pyramids of fruit and vegetables and dried fish and slices of soap. Even at the height of the civil war, in the most perilous of places, like Malanje, being bombed every day, the shells landing, killing and maiming, you could still go to the market in the centre of town and buy enough grains of coffee, rolled into a small ball in clingfilm, to start your day with the necessary kick.

The funny thing is, I had been reminded of Malanje the very first time I encountered Vlatka’s art, which was long before this Biennale. As I recall, I was online scrolling through photographs of her work when I was struck by a particular series of images from a performance in Poznan, western Poland, titled This Here and That There, 2015.

These images show a woman striding across the stone floor of an old slaughterhouse. It has huge white walls stretching up to a roof made of tin. The woman wears a black dress. Her arms are swinging and her legs are bare. She is wearing a sliver of a shoe on either foot. She seems to be in a state of total absorption. She is walking up an aisle between two rows of chairs. They are the sort of chairs you see in lecture halls and press conferences, in dentists’ waiting rooms and public libraries, in nail bars, pharmacies, cafes, coach stations, and banks. They are the sort of chairs you sit on outside the toilets of local authority buildings; which, as a child, you stacked at the back of your school assembly hall. But in this photograph, the chairs look like they are standing to attention. They appear to be showing their respect to the woman. She could be their god, their heavenly guide here on Earth.

In another image, hilarious and raw, four chairs are humping one another, bareback style, one on top of the other. These are writhing, sliding, fucking chairs.

In another, the woman coaxes the chairs into a spiral. Her long locks are swinging with the movement of her body. Everything seems to be in harmony. What is she whispering into their secret chair ears?

In yet another image, the chairs are spread out around the sides of a building. They are all facing the wall. There appears to have been a disagreement, an almighty falling out, a complete breakdown in communication. The woman is standing at the far end of the space, her right hand covering half her face. She looks exasperated. She looks as if she no longer knows what to do.

In another image, some of the chairs are lying on their sides, some of them still standing but completely exhausted, some leaning on one another to stop themselves collapsing to the floor. These are chairs after a brawl. In another, the chairs are paired, face to face. I can’t make up my mind if they are competing in a game of chess or participating in a speed-dating night. Perhaps they are trying to reach some sort of truce?

In another, the chairs are queuing patiently in a long line. At first, I wonder if they are waiting to vote, but the longer I look at them, the more I start to see starving chairs that are waiting for food. I notice the stains of damp spreading across the walls. I see the huge petals of peeling paint. There is plenty of graffiti too. But the woman—Vlatka—is always there, arranging and rearranging her chairs.

When I initially encountered these images some seven or eight years ago, I was reminded of a warehouse in Malanje during the final phase of Angola’s civil war. The building was packed with starving people. There were dozens of women with tiny babies clinging to their sides, some of them pulling on their mothers’ flat, empty breasts. I remember an elderly man who had propped himself up on a broken branch. There were children still with the energy to play, some of them chasing a wheel with a stick, spinning it across the warehouse floor. I was there to gather information about the conflict. I was there to ask questions of these people, who had fled their homes and their land, who had seen much of death. I was there to make notes to try to understand the impact of the war. But looking at these images today, observing Vlatka arranging and rearranging dozens of chairs over eight hours inside this old slaughterhouse, I feel encouraged to believe that that we might yet find ways to arrange the world differently.

* * * *

It seems to me that By the Means at Hand expands Vlatka’s radical determination to create works of art that not only disrupt the way we understand the world, but shake our perception of what we see as we move through it. We are living in a moment in which we know that the world is warming at an alarming speed. We know that environmental destruction is accelerating. We know that more and more people’s lives are at risk and that more and more species are facing extinction. Tension is everywhere. We are in conflict with ourselves and with the planet. There is no escape.

This is precisely the strength of Vlatka’s work. Her art explodes our imagination, allowing us to envisage a different future. Two years ago, she produced an astonishing visual diary, To See Stars over Mountains. She created it during lockdown in 2021, generating one image for each day. These were photographs with a twist. Mainly depicting her London neighbourhood of Tottenham—the one where Disney and Reginaldo met—she began by taking photographs of humdrum blocks of flats, tarmac roads, playing fields, streams, a canal. But each photo had then been doctored: drawn on, sliced into, glued on, disfigured. They invited dreaming, laughing, imagining. Sometimes they suggested fragility, sometimes apocalypse. Sometimes they offered hope. Most striking, for me, was their long-term effect. These pictures opened new paths in my mind. Wherever I go, I still see orange curls coming out of trees, curious mirrors on roads, cutups and foldouts that don’t really exist. Except, now, they do.

By the Means at Hand suits the spirit of our time. As with much of Vlatka’s work, the project comes with a kind of built-in precariousness. It could fail. No doubt not all of the hundred-plus artists she has invited to participate in this project will manage to get their work to Venice. There will be delays and there will be no-shows. There will be works torn by baggage handlers or perhaps impounded by customs officials. A drawing here or there might be spoiled by a burst bottle of shampoo in a suitcase or simply be forgotten and left behind on someone’s sofa.

For every work that does make it to Venice, Vlatka will send one back via the same network. Again, things might not go as planned! Riffing on To See Stars over Mountains, she will be snapping and then remaking images of Venice. My imagination has already started dreaming up all kinds of things I might expect to see erupting from the city’s canals, its ancient buildings and myriad islands, after they have been chopped into and coloured on and turned upside down under the artist’s inventive eye.

Once, Venice was the most powerful city in Europe, its navy crossing the sea back and forth to the Middle East and Asia. With ships and trade came many different people and cultures. The history of Venice contradicts the story so many politicians try to sell us, that Africans should stay in Africa and Muslims stay in the Middle East and west Asia, that Europe is for Europeans alone. But people have always crossed the seas for trade and war and survival, blending cultures all around the Mediterranean.

When I think about this project, I find it impossible not to think of the people trying to reach Europe, fleeing conflict and climate disaster, desperately chasing their hopes for a better life. I find it impossible to unsee the people who are willing to risk their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas in overcrowded boats. Some of these people will never make it. Some will get held up by border guards or picked up by maritime authorities and sent back to the last country they passed through. Some of them will never reach the sea but die of thirst and hunger in the Sahara, be sold into slavery in Libya, or get shot by border police as they are wading through rivers along national frontiers or throwing themselves at exceptionally high barbed-wire fences.

By the Means at Hand insists on the belief that migration is reciprocal. One work of art comes in, another work of art goes out. Each piece is created by an artist who is living as a “foreigner” somewhere around the world. Vlatka’s own history feeds into this idea. Venice is just a hundred kilometres across the sea from Croatia, where she was born and grew up. But her journey to this Biennale has been far less direct, taking in the United States, where she went to live as a teenager, and London, where she now lives with her British partner. On the journey, she has been an artist for almost two decades. If that makes this migrant artist sound rootless, her work for the Biennale shows just how strong her roots are, how far they reach, and how warmly they wrap around the world.

Lara Pawson lives on the edge of London, as close as she can get to the forest. She is the author of three books, including Spent Light (CB editions, 2024), which was published in January. It is a hybrid work of fiction, memoir, and history, and has been widely celebrated by the critics. This Is the Place to Be (CB editions, 2016) was her acclaimed memoir about her life as a journalist in Angola and Ivory Coast during both countries’ civil wars. In the Name of the People (IB Tauris, 2014) is a work of investigative journalism about a massacre in Angola that was covered up by the authorities with the help of a number of foreign correspondents. Between 1996 and 2007, Lara was a foreign correspondent for the BBC in several African countries, as well as a senior broadcast journalist in the BBC Africa Service in London. She speaks Portuguese, English, and rusty French.