april 20

november 24

2024

project artist curator contributors reader press impressum contact
Asset 1

croatian pavilion at the 60TH

international art exhibition

la biennale di venezia

vlatka horvat

by the means at hand

Underwater Art

Massimiliano Mollona

In 1942, the German Jew Curt Bloch started an underground magazine from a tiny loft in the Dutch city of Enschede, where he was living in hiding from the Nazi police. Called Het Onderwater Cabaret—“Underwater Cabaret”—after an anti-Fascist radio broadcast of the time, the magazine used satirical poems, songs, and photomontages to poke fun at Nazi propaganda while capturing the brutish essence of the regime. Bertus and Aleida Menneken, the members of a local resistance organization that sheltered Bloch, smuggled into their home the necessary supplies for Het Onderwater Cabaret. Sourcing this material was difficult and dangerous and relied on an informal network of art suppliers, rubbish collectors, intellectuals, and artists who were sympathetic to the project. Each issue consisted of just one handwritten original copy; its small format enabled it to be passed around easily, handed over in secrecy, and carried in the pockets of jackets, raincoats, or handbags of its readers. During the two years he spent in hiding, Bloch produced ninety-five booklets, which circulated widely, each according to its own timeline, but eventually all returned to their author at the end of their “life cycle.”

There are three extraordinary aspects to the story of Het Onderwater Cabaret. First, the value of the project rested not just in its artistic content or form but in its relational process: it created an expanded, informal, and underground network of suppliers, distributors, and readers who shared a common political agenda and whose roles fluidly changed and overlapped. Secondly, there was the sustainability of the circular economy on which the publication relied. Recalling the gift economy observed by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, the magazine inverted the logic of bourgeois art production. Its aim was not to produce an “object” with some economic or artistic value, but to develop solidarity and social connectivity at a time marked by brutality and violence. So, despite having very little or no economic value—a few pencils, pens, and secondhand magazines—Het Onderwater Cabaret ended up having a significant readership, precisely because, as with the “primitive gift,” its value as an object derived from the connections it made possible and not on quantifiable or monetary standards. The third extraordinary aspect of Het Onderwater Cabaret is its affective register, particularly its satirical and comedic tone and epigrammatic form, which seem to clash with the historical experience of war and the Holocaust. Take, for instance, Bloch’s poem “The Way to Truth,” which suggests how to deal with Goebbels’s propaganda:

If he writes straight, read it crooked.

If he writes crooked, read it straight.

Yes, just turn his writings around.

In all his useful words, harm is found.

I see this satirical register as a specific political position, a way of creating some distance from the tragic experience of oppression, through which the oppressors are seen for what they really are: a debased—banal, Hannah Arendt would say—form of humanity, rather than an unstoppable and superhuman force.

By the Means at Hand offers a similar vision of art as an undercommons: that is, as a space for the socialization of resources and imagination based on resilient and invisible networks of mutual exchange that operate at the fringes or under the surface of the mainstream art world.

Horvat’s main installation will continuously transform, incorporating performative exchanges with a network of diasporic artists in which the artwork (as well as various other materials, such as documents, letters, and journals) will circulate by improvised means. Horvat will rearrange and catalogue the photos, drawings, and myriad other fragments of this extended conversation, together with her own drawings and collages, into an ever-expanding living archive embodying the diasporic experience.

By the Means at Hand challenges several principles of bourgeois art. First, it replaces the figure of the artist as sole author with a loose collective of as-yet unknown artists whose identities and nationalities are unspecified but who share a common diasporic condition, thus going against the national(ist) framework of the Venice Biennale. Secondly, it subverts the standard temporalities and geographies of art production by proposing a process of art-making that fluidly unfolds across different possible locations and temporalities. Here, the artwork acquires a life of its own and even its own diasporic identity, traveling to Venice but also away from it, across different countries, to be seen not just in museums or art galleries but also “by improvised means”: on the windows of the artists’ homes, on their cars, or on the local notice boards. Thirdly, it sets up an alternative economic circuit whereby the pavilion becomes the epicenter of an expanded circular trade not just of artwork, but also of messages, letters, and documents, thus entangling the economy of art production within the economy of the gift and contaminating the bourgeois logic of art and profit with different kinds of attachments, made in the name of love, friendship, or political solidarity.

By the Means at Hand is an invitation to make art that responds to the urgencies and contingencies of our time, a time of war, ecological collapse, and deep economic inequality. But the invitation comes in a subtly irreverent register that opens a space of collective action by playfully decentering the rules of the art “industry.” In this regard, By the Means at Hand reflects Horvat’s own practice, in which she often assumes the role of mediator or bricoleur—the term French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used to describe someone who performs the labor of the anthropologist.[i] She pieces together fragments of incommensurable lives in a makeshift and improvised way, forging a community that, mirroring the soft movements of the Venetian lagoon, coalesces around mobility and flow.

It is no coincidence that Horvat’s practice often revolves around collage, particularly in her compelling work To See Stars over Mountains, 2021. Indeed, for French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, the collage and the photomontage perfectly embody the experience of exile, displacement, and “freedom in transit.”[ii] As Curt Bloch was at work on Het Onderwater Cabaret, the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, traveling in exile across Europe, and unable to produce art that could speak directly to the brutality of Nazism, turned to these techniques, interspersed with epigrammatic comments, for a journal of his own, which he imagined as Kriegsschauplatz—a “theater of war.” Used by the Dadaist to mock the propaganda peddled by mainstream media, the photomontage treated documentary evidence with a degree of skepticism, reminding the beholder that the brutality of war defied standard modes of representation. Or, to put it differently, that a mass of unrepresented subjects—often subjects living in resistance—existed at the edge or outside the representational frame.

Like Brecht’s journal, Horvat’s installation is a space of images in movement. It takes an intermediate position—not too close and tragic, not too distant and rational—at a time when generalized violence seems to stem from primordial and essentializing forms of cultural (racial, sexual, or ethnic) identification, if not from some other economic calculus.

By the Means at Hand responds not just to Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa’s call to reflect on our common condition of being foreigners—as well as on the heavy colonial heritage associated with the national framework of the Venice Biennale—but also to the material conditions of late capitalism, particularly as they are experienced in Venice, a city that is literally collapsing underwater, lashed by the waves of the megaferries, frozen by the capital of foreign oligarchs, weighted down by crowds of visiting tourists, and poisoned by the chemicals of nearby industries.

Beyond a playful reenactment of diasporic relationalities and ways of making, By the Means at Hand, as I see it, is a prefiguration of the slow process of human migration underwater, of the reckoning with the damaged political ecology of our Earth and “heaviness” of our seas[iii], as well as an opening to new, more-than-human horizons, new potential alliances and lines of solidarity in times of permanent war, when it feels there is no ground left to stand on.


[i] Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. 1962.

[ii] Goerges Didi-Hubermann, G. The Eye of History. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2018. Pg 16.

[iii] I am referring to Elizabeth Deloughrey’s decolonial discussion of oceanic spaces (“Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity”, PMLA 125, no. 3 [May 2010], 703–712.)

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics, anthropology, and visual art, and his work focuses on the relationship between art and the political economy, with a specific focus on work, class, and post-capitalist politics. He is a co-founder and member of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and the Laboratory for the Urban Commons, (LUC) Athens.