Venice Biennale 2026 Spanish Pavilion

There have been several articles about the ‘best’ pavilions at the Venice Biennale, and we agree with some of them. When we were there, on a Tuesday in July, two performance pavilions – The Netherlands and Austria - were closed, so we did not see the much-talked-about Austrian pavilion performance, only the bell hanging outside it. Three other venues were closed: Russia, Israel (although there was a separate Israel pavilion in the Arsenal), and Venezuela (said to be renovating, but it’s hard to know for sure).

The Spanish Pavilion, the first one along the left pathway, has walls covered with postcards, an exhibition titled “Los Restos” (The Remains) by Oriol Vilanova, whose practice involves acquiring a range of “devalued” objects at flea markets, He has collected postcards for the past twenty years. The booklet accompanying the exhibition by Carles Guerra, says “His use of postcards serves none of the archival or documentary purposes that are so common nowadays, but instead entails the recognition that even decrepitude and waste constitute areas not necessarily associated with melancholic stasis, or even with the recovery of that inevitable past so essential to photography” Whatever…

I was taken first just by the number of postcards, arranged in orderly blocks by subject, color, or format (i.e. buildings all oriented in the same direction). All those cats and flamingos, next to rows of classical statues, monumental buildings, the Twin Towers, snowscapes, then bands featuring a single color, sometimes making a vertical stripe in the room. One image shows yellow flowers, two rows of flying squirrels, and buildings with American flags.  Another juxtaposes multiple views of the Twin Towers and various birds. So on the one hand it’s a vast abstract design. But looking at the individual cards and the groups of cards evokes various emotional responses.

Wandering through the rooms, you’re reminded of places you’ve seen or read about, struck with the varieties of familiar animals and plants, engaged with the diverse objects in some sections. It’s a panoply of the world in rectangular cards, all the same size. The list of topics includes 161 items in alphabetical order, for example, Pagoda, Painter, Parasol, Parrot, Pink, Playground, Pool, Pope, Pulpit, Pyramid. There seem to be endless things to discover and multiple ways to look at the project.

These cards are probably all unused, but I wasn’t sure if there aren’t messages on some of them, and that calls up the way postcards are a means of communication, the short form of a letter, keeping in touch with a note and a picture.

I often read mention of people collecting postcards. Decades ago, I used to collect them for my work as an art historian. The color postcards in museums and churches were better than the black and white slides we had for teaching and I planned to use them to make color slides. They also were reminders of works of art I saw in obscure locations.  Computers, the internet, and PowerPoint have eliminated any use for the postcards, but they’re still stored somewhere, and I have to resist buying them still. Vilanova’s display calls attention to the things in the world people value enough to want a picture to keep or share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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