Muntadas on translation: Stand by

In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish pavilion, told a reporter that the Biennale takes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new... but by now it is an obsolete structure. Muntadas´s On Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense--how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor... by the media, of course, by context and by history. Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the Biennale´s Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and translations it has undergone over time, and investigating Venice´s status and the space that frames the Biennale. Muntadas notes, for instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussolini´s orders was replaced again after the war.