The Arsenale Nuovo exhibition opened, and I did not really know what the Venice Biennale actually meant yet. The champagne was drunk. Loyal Marina had flown in from London to support me, as was her habit for every exhibition I had abroad since meeting in Paris. She caught the eye of a handsome Mexican who came to the opening but unfortunately got lost right after it.
The rest of the evening, we swung about Venice, rode the vaporetti from dinner to party. As the clock struck Cinderella's hour, or as my grandpa would say, a time for all fine ladies to be at home, we headed out to a pier where, at midnight, a boat was picking up "art babies" and transporting them over the dark Adriatic and into a summer land.
It sailed to one of the furthest little islands from Venice. The phantom captain did not speak a word; he just stopped the boat, and the art monkeys, who had been drinking stolen champagne, spilled out like zombie ants and went in search of their queen.
The island was savage and black. Nothing other than thorn bushes and tree silhouettes were visible, apart from a trail of red floor candles which set us on a mile-long trail through the brush in high heels, to the accompaniment of a hysterical cricket orchestra. There was no clue as to what lay at the end of the path, so we kept on walking to the island's end. Under an arch of brick, a dazzling opera singer sang and played the grand piano. Behind the arch was the black sea. We danced to an operatic song and then set about sniffing around to find whatever was happening.
Eventually, we stumbled upon a garden of a castle in ruins, which were lit up. In the midst of the court, a giant chessboard represented the dance floor. A DJ played music, and elegant zombies floated in the ruins, climbing walls and staircases leading to nowhere, resembling the Labyrinth movie set. Only the tower of the castle had remained intact, and it seemed the ants had found their queen in it, for they were milling to the top of it. I, too, climbed up and found a free cocktail bar, which explained its popularity. The dance floor quickly filled with newcomers from the boats, and the music threw everyone into a trance.
Dance, dance, dance—the biennales are about the parties and dancing. And so, we danced and danced for hours beneath the stars, with dozens of partners, spinning and catching polystyrene bubbles thrown about. Marina rediscovered her handsome Mexican boy and disappeared into her own romance.
At some point, the exhaustion of preparing a show and partying lured me off the chessboard and into the garden, where I came upon a great mound of polystyrene bubbles with people sitting within, laughing. As it seemed a perfectly good spot for a time-out, I joined them in the polystyrene, and soon its warmth lulled me into sleep.
Awoken by Gabriele's laughing and calling, my eyes reluctantly opened to find myself amidst a group of naked boys. They were prancing about in some sort of tribal dance in the polystyrene, willies jangling freely, while I, in a bright pink dress, had slept in the middle of their stage.
The whole thing was surreal. Women passed by wearing pink and blue wigs. Dazed and sleepy, I wanted Marina to take me home, but, despite not admitting it yet, she had fallen in love that evening and was not going to leave the island until she got her first kiss. As dawn spilled out, Marina became bored of waiting and diplomatically informed and insisted to the Mexican that she really, absolutely, in no way, did not want him to kiss her. Of course, through reverse psychology, she forced him to do it.
For her, this was the beginning of a great love story, while for me, it was a great procrastination before I finally reached a long-awaited soft bed and saved the whole incident into the fragmented dream memory. There it all remained until, back home in Rome, an art journalist went out of his way to graciously inform me that there were "photographs of you in a magazine during the orgy with Gelitin in Venice." The "It was not me" argument was immediately beaten with his detailed description of the pink dress.
(Gelitin - a group of Austrian artists)
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