“GOD THE FIRST GARDEN MADE, AND THE FIRST CITY, CAIN.”
THE GARDEN, ABRAHAM COWLEY
The Ending of the End is one of ten sections of Lanfranco Aceti’s installation titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender which was conceived by the artist for the Italian Pavilion, Resilient Communities, curated by Alessandro Melis for the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. The ten sections are: Tools for Catching Clouds; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part I; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part II; Sacred Waters; Le Schiavone; Orthós; Seven Veils; Signs; Rehearsal; and The Ending of the End. These sections, singularly and collectively, create a complex narrative that responds to this year’s theme How Will We Live Together? set by Hashim Sarkis, curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.
The works of art — realized as a series of performances, installations, sculptures, video, and painting contributions — are part of the installation at the Italian Pavilion from May 21, 2021, to November 21, 2021, the opening and closing dates of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
“There is nothing left, but the ruins.” Explains the artist. “But it is over the ruins that things get rebuilt.” For Aceti the arrival of disaster announces the creation of the ruins and the production of something new. But the end is not a clean affaire. It is a process, a transformation that goes on despite the fact that one assumes that the end is a fixed point in time and in space, generally speaking linked to a precise event. It is a process with no beginning or ending. The works of art that appear in this section conclude, formally, a complex process that went on for two years. It is a process of doing that has accumulated the research of the past and the present and that concocted an idea of the end that might give birth to a possible future, beyond and as an alternative to the city dwelling of those who bear the mark of Cain. Departing from traditional binary perspectives on beginnings and endings, this collection suggests that what we perceive as an end is, in fact, a point of transition, brimming with potential for renewal and transformation.
