In a perfect world, there would be no war, misery, evil, atrocities, nor the relentless repetition of everything that degrades life on this Earth and throughout history. If I had a magic wand at the exact moment I came to understand all of this, it would be immediate: paradise on Earth, peace, kindness, work, dignity, support.
But there is no perfect world. There is this one. And it is in this one that we live, think, fall ill, create, and persist.
Perhaps that is precisely why art and the institutions that still try to operate with some integrity must take on a difficult task: to sustain what is possible without hiding inside comforting utopias.
This position emerges from a structural and historical paradox. We speak of freedom amid violence. We speak of creation amid collapse. We speak of encounter in a world organized by war, exploitation, erasure, and inequality. We speak of art while, in so many places, what is still at stake is survival itself.
And yet, even so, still, I continue to think that art can be a space of freedom, of dreaming, of effort, of elaboration, and of presence.
When I imagine myself in the place of an artist from an Indigenous people, an artist from a country at war, someone shaped by extreme, shocking, agonizing realities, I do not think of purity, nor of easy redemption. I think of persistence. I think of the act of making despite everything. I think of art as one of the few ways to keep alive the possibility of appearing when nearly everything around us is working to reduce, silence, crush, or destroy.
I change my mind. I am afraid. I do not speak from a pure, stable, or innocent place. And perhaps that is precisely why I still want art — and also biennials, Documenta, the encounters, debates, and conversations art makes possible — to be taken seriously as a space of encounter, visibility, and transmission.
Not because art is going to save the world. That would be imprecise, and perhaps even irresponsible to say. Art does not replace food, ceasefires, justice, public policy, reparation, redistribution, shelter, or care. But art can produce something that is not small: a field in which distinct experiences, forms, memories, conflicts, and imaginaries may appear before one another. And appearing is not a small thing. Being seen is not a small thing. Not being immediately erased is not a small thing.
I would like the great international exhibitions, the biennials, the documentas, the spaces of debate and circulation, to be that as well: not merely showcase, endorsement, market, cultural tourism, symbolic capital, or soft diplomacy, but real support for art, for artists, and for the possibility that the world might see what is being produced in contexts profoundly different from one another. That they might truly be places where countries could show the living, pulsing, urgent, contradictory, and powerful art they are producing.
I am not speaking of a pacified map of the world. I am not speaking of false harmony. I am not speaking of an art domesticated to appear universally acceptable. I mean precisely the opposite: a space where real differences may appear without being immediately neutralized; where conflicts may be seen without being turned into empty spectacle; where the complexity of the world may find form, body, image, language, presence.
For me, peace does not exist only in abstract agreements or in correct discourse. Peace is also rehearsed in encounter. In listening. In the possibility that something from one world may reach another without first being destroyed. In the possibility of seeing and being seen. In the refusal of erasure. In the recognition that human and non-human experience on this planet is far greater, more unequal, more violent, and more complex than ready-made narratives can bear.
Perhaps art is one of the few fields where we can still bring together imagination, form, critique, memory, dissensus, pain, desire, and thought without reducing everything to a single function. Perhaps that is why I still want to defend it. Perhaps that is why I still want it to circulate, to appear, to be seen, to be taken seriously. Perhaps that is why I still want a biennial to be more than an event: to be, also, a planetary transmission, a field of appearance, a support, an opening.
Yes, I think art can be that rare space that hardly exists anywhere else: a space where it is still possible to show, to see, to elaborate, to tension, and to share. And I also think that, along this path — insufficient, partial, fragile, but real — art can be one more way toward peace.
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