Giardini: A Fairytale

A visually sumptuous film of thirty minutes, Giardini comprises two projections set side-by-side, which steadily gather a series of evocative vignettes. Like McQueen’s past films, such as Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep (2002) and Gravesend (2007), Giardini denies clear links between representation and significance, between form and content – not to exclude reference but instead to allow the image’s potential meanings to crystallize, its facets reflecting numerous paths of fabulation.

Indeed, the film’s suspension of its images in a field of multiple possibilities defines its power: to release life from belonging to any certain code, clear narrative, or restrictive regimen, and to do so in the quintessential location of national order: the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. As its title indicates, the film is set in the famous exhibition grounds. These otherwise well-known monuments are shown here in an unexpected light, during the interim between biennales, in the down-time and during the nights, in the shadows of spectacle. The renowned gardens are thereby recast as a site where everything is suddenly up for grabs, seems unfamiliar and unpredictable, where life is shown to assume forms of creative survival that transcend the fanfare of the great exhibition. Giardini constructs a fictional world and does so with great care, although its stories are not necessarily impossible accounts of what might actually happen.

This fiction, which exists within the realm of the possible, displaces another fiction, an exhibition that brings the Giardini to life every year (with the alternating art and architecture biennales) by engaging the signs of empire set within its midst.

Spinning a fiction of multiple strands, Giardini advances what author Jorge Luis Borges termed “a garden of forking paths” in a well-known story from his book Labyrinths. Referenced by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time Image, it serves for him as a metaphor for the cinematic crystallization of time, for its winding of the real and the virtual into a knot of indeterminate relation, for the co-existence of multiple potential narrative threads that characterizes post-WWII-era film, from Alain Resnais to Federico Fellini.For the film’s positioning of geography as a site of creative potential – where different forms of life beyond conventional regimes that structure existence become possible – mirrors the re-invention of film as a locus of generative imagination. Giardini not only disarticulates expectations about a charged landscape, but opens up new forms of cinematic perception, which occurs in several ways, defining the film’s singularity. First, Giardini’s split-screen format disavows the definitive account, the singular expression, its doubled image announcing contingency, multiplicity, potentiality. Our gaze is consequently trained on the out-of-frame, defining a second aspect of perceptual shift: not only is this fact indicated by the dual screens – any one image is necessarily incomplete, supplemental, and therefore the gaps between and within the images become operative as dark forces of virtuality – but also the camera emphasises its blurred focus, extreme close-ups and tightly framed compositions of peripheral areas, and nocturnal and shadowy scenes.

Giardini continues the political commitment of McQueen’s cinema in two ways: first, by its making visible the figure of the excluded – the stateless, and racial and sexual outsider – upon the rarified set of the showpieces of national spectacle; and second, by directing the power of film to resist conventional representational systems, by producing an experience of perceptual creativity that denies the certainty of identity and the clarity of signs on which hegemonic order rests. (exhibition catalogue essay by T.J.Demos)