The most significant aspect of the ‘libertarian’ provocation of the Putin Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale is the most grotesque, namely the attempt to justify its bureaucratic normality.

There was – President Buttafuoco’s entourage made it known – no personalised invitation to the Kremlin. The rules of the Biennale stipulate that the twenty-nine countries that have, like Russia, a permanent national pavilion within the Giardini della Biennale have an acquired right to participate in the Exhibition. So what’s the problem?

Obviously, what opened the doors to Putin, apart from the unsurpassable regulatory protocol, was the inspired and equally implacable defence of the freedom of art and artists, Russian and from everywhere, and all the other bellicries of the collective Paolo Nori, who for four years has been explaining how blocking the way to the Kremlin’s hybrid war means outraging Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and guiltily doing to Putin what we accuse Putin (who knows whether rightly or wrongly, then…) of wanting to do to us. The Moscow free-speech hacks have method and constancy, but no imagination.

On this occasion, moreover, Italy has discovered that friendship is not the exclusive prerogative of the left and its media and cultural apparatuses, given that a broad cross-section of big names, more interested in the autonomy of culture from politics and of the Biennale from the government than in the regrettable circumstance of a Venetian showcase kindly offered to the professionals of Russian soft power, have come out in support of Buttafuoco.

The formal opposition of the executive and Minister Giuli to the Biennale’s choice was not enough for the EU Commission and twenty-two European Culture Ministers.
The former called on national institutions ‘to act in accordance with EU sanctions and avoid giving space to individuals who have actively supported or justified the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine’ and threatened the interruption of European funding to the Biennale.

The grotesque of normality

The latter denounced how Russian participation ‘projects an image of international legitimisation and acceptance’ of a war of aggression that ‘has caused widespread destruction not only against the Ukrainian people, but also against their cultural life and heritage, including museums, historical sites and monuments’.
Adding the grotesque to the grotesque was Buttafuoco who, in an effort of Dadaist pluralism, assured that he also wanted to leave space for Russian dissent, with a site dedicated to Pavel Florensky, the philosopher and priest killed by the KGB in 1937 and for years annexed by Putin to his Pantheon of champions of Russian national spirituality. As Nona Mikhelidze wrote in X, ‘In this way, Buttafuoco ends up creating de facto two pavilions favourable to the regime: one official, organised by the representatives of culture under the control of power, and the other – the construction site he imagines as a space for dissent – which in reality is perfectly integrated into the same ideological narrative promoted by Putin. The problem of the West, and of Italians in particular, in talking about Russia is often this: a superficial knowledge of the culture they say they love and want to defend from censorship“.

The Biennial pavilion – let’s face it – will not host Russian culture, but a delegation of artists selected by the Kremlin to say and do what the Kremlin wants to be said and done, to the greater glory of Putinist Russia. Buttafuoco, who held Putin in such high esteem a few years ago, will set the audience and stage for a special cultural operation in the Lagoon.

The government between ambiguity and recitation

In the division of labour between pro-Russians (many), anti-Russians (very few) and agnostics (most), the government, as usual, is juggling to play all possible parts in the play and leave no position undefined. Buttafuoco plays the good cop (or bad cop?) and Giuli the bad cop (or good cop?). In short, the usual Meloni government: with Ukraine, but also not; against Putin, but also not.