San Lazzaro

Today I visited the Armenian Pavilion on the island of San Lazzaro, 15 minutes southeast by water from Piazza San Marco. It was a fraught visit in many ways, and so moving in others. Despite my research, I hadn’t learnt that it opened at 1pm, not 10am like every other Biennale site. And so, I arrived to the island-come-monastery two hours early. A monk saw me sitting in the garden and came to me, offering me entry—a kind gesture for which I am thankful. This gesture gave me about an hour’s respite as I quietly made my way through the first part of the exhibition, around the bright cloister, and along a corridor in which I found a site-specific installation of five videos by filmmaker Nigal Bezjian, set among the monastery’s usual display of the parts of its antique print workshop. Through this line of print blocks, tools, machines, texts and maps I move slowly, like a bibliophile who has discovered that heaven is, in fact, a library./ Soon I face Bezjian’s first video, a reading by Marc Nichanian of Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan’s 'To the Cilician Ashes.' The intensity of this man as he reads his poet, was like the cast of a fine dialogical mesh and I found myself weeping with him, even though his emotion is only in his hand movements, his looks to camera, his voice, his words, while mine leaks profusely from the fleshy corners of eyes. He tells me that poetry is the medium of mourning and as I stand in that corridor, I am mourning and yet aware of my inability to mourn a mother who died before I came to Venice. ‘It will catch up with you’ someone said to me before I left New Zealand, because I said I hadn’t really had a good chance to cry. How do you do it? In this place, there is so much possibility, so much death, so many voices, and I am diving head first into the waters of it, and later, noting the details of apparatus and the precision and passion of texts in my notebook./100 years ago, the Armenian nation was subject to genocide, and can never recover from this—so I understand from the art of this exhibition. This catastrophic ‘event’ has neither central name, nor recognition: it has become nets within nets of people, and nets within nets of stories, and questions./ Here am I then, the daughter of a mother, in some ways, I felt I never really knew, a mother who left, who had to be sought out, who opened herself later in life, but only in certain ways. What is my sorrow? And what are the words for sorrow? Nichanian interprets Varoujan and poses a question: What is the song one inscribes on one’s own epitaph as the artist who dies to find the death of another--this notion of the poet writing for his lost land? That question is so heavy I carry the heft of it as I sit with another work elsewhere and am, unexpectedly, asked to leave the pavilion by a Biennale attendant. I should not have ‘snuck in early’, and this is totally fair enough (after all, I’m an attendant myself!)./ I move outside just as a boat pulls up to the island and a tour group of about 50 climbs aboard and I wait close to doors that finally open and humbly pay the entry fee I did not realise was owing and quickly make my way to the ‘main’ part of the exhibition. Too slow. There are the intrepid 'tourists', forming a human barricade in a tiny room between two others—the nexus point of the two upstairs rooms of the exhibition. The bodies of its throng hardly budge until a French couple barges through to the staccato of their accented mutterings, and I follow./ Away, I find a work on paper, on the floor, intriguing, an embossing of white text on white, perhaps Varoujan again. I bend to see, and, so soon, there comes the mass, too quick for me to move. And I am apparently in the way as one un-gentle-man decides to mark his passage, stomping right over the artwork in front of me. I am taken aback and I am angry: I yell at him ‘you’re walking on the artwork!’. He half turns, uncaring, unable to understand the language and lash of my tongue. I am exasperated. I am fuming like an art historian and curator branded with a red-hot iron and I tell the attendant what I think—the one who escorted me out over an hour ago: this is no good, this mass, this throng, this walking on the artwork. He bends and straightens the artwork and tells me ‘it is okay.’ But it’s not okay, and I snarl that I will return when there are not ‘too many people’, but I don’t. I go to the reading of Varoujan for a moment and then I go to meet the next commuter boat. And then I return, through yet another throng to San Marco to an apartment to write, not the poem that I had a vision of writing through tears, the one I would supposedly have written in the garden later, or unburdened in the cloister, but one entitled 'To the ashes, San Lazarro', which follows... There is a decision/ at the end/ of a block of type/ at its end/ it takes ink/ and weight and press/ for paper and handles turned tight/ laid out flat scythed and cut at corners/ sheared like board/ engraved, incised, creased and perforated/ with the promise/ of curlicues and reading backwards/ across the surface of maps and production and direction/ set on steady legs and ready for/ rollers with arm-width handles/ and tables for spreading a thick gloss/ of the alphabet—poetry is the medium/ of mourning he says with ashes/ and a question of the possibility of it still/ in cases labelled ‘E’, ‘M’, ‘S’, ‘K’, ‘Q’/ along the glass of the archive/ and golden spines that have taken the seal/ rolled against or punched straight in/ there are tools that make us/ xylographic, lithographic, megalithic/ on an island of books/ and switches, screws, pulleys, tapes, trays, springs/ bolts, pistons, wires, keepers, handles/ chains, cogs, molds, stands and boards/ I find a marble tomb I am still/ to inscribe/ for my mother.
Hear the sound work on Soundcloud.