TO HOLD, TO GIVE, TO RECEIVE is the theme of the Coimbra Biennale ‘26
If you decide to visit the 17th century Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova – perched atop a hill in the Portuguese university city, and overlooking the medieval centre of Coimbra from across the Mondego river – do bear in mind that the place might be haunted.
You need nerves to walk through the black ground-floor corridor of the dormitory wing, where tortured wails ambush you from the monkish cells. Sung in Albanian, Chinese , Kurdish, Kyrgyz and Turkish, these laments are part of an installation (‘Start Again the Lament’) by US artist Taryn Simon.
After the last nun died in 1891, Santa Clara-a-Nova served for almost a century as a barracks for the Portuguese army, and since 2015 the convent has been the central hub of Anozero, a biennal art festival with works from all over the world. But that arrangement however, could soon come to and end as the government has recently granted a private company the right to develop the former nunnery into a hotel.
The concept of a city hosting an international art exhibition at regular intervals goes back to the first Venice Biennale of 1895, when the capital of Veneto sought to rejuvenate the Italian art market. The festival brought in visitors who would later return as tourists, while also granting the local population access to international artworks.
In the 1990s – fuelled by cheap air travel and the Bilbao effect – every city wanted its own biennale such as Kassel’s Documenta, New York’s Whitney Biennal and the Bienal de São Paulo. But with the boom came backlash: the suspicion that biennales were above all an excuse for a select, international art crowd descending on a city for just a few weeks and leaving behind a large carbon footprint but little meaningful engagement with the local population.
Despite being around since 2015 and operating on a modest budget, Coimbra’s Anozero has been at the forefront of art festivals trying to rethink the format.
’In Portugal, we have a tendency to live on old glories,’ says Carlos Antunes, co-founder and director. ‘The biennal is meant to be a door to the future.’
This year, Anozero’s curators propose a new remedy for biennale fatigue: anarchism. Its title Segurar, Dar, Receber ( to hold, to give, to receive) turns out to be inspired by Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist philosopher. Anarchism here does not mean anarchy but cooperation. Kropotkin’s idea was that mutual aid was more central to evolution than Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest.
For the opening, Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo led a delegation of 260 singers – all dressed in white and taken from local choirs – on a march from the city’s central square to the convent, while singing a chorus from Verdi’s opera Nabucco.
For its next edition in 2028, Anozero is teaming up with Manifesta, the nomadic cultural biennale, that travels to a different location in Europe every two years.
Anozero runs at the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova and various venues across Coimbra until July 6
Enjoy your week Aproveite a semana (pic Público/Guardian)