Venice Biennale 2026: Beauty as a Condemnation

Arriving in Venice in June 2026 is a jarring experience, with 38-degree heat pinning you against damp walls while every step becomes an exhausting negotiation between the desire to observe and the primal need to breathe. 

The city appears as a Babel-like organism, a machine spinning aimlessly, lubricated only by the excess of our expectations, where the new "dynamic toll"—which modulates entry fees based on crowd density—is merely the final piece of a total commodification: the right to the city transformed into a premium subscription, a luxury service for those who can afford the privilege of breathing its air. 

In the Giardini, the silence of the pavilions desperately attempts to impose itself over the external roar, with the Holy See Pavilion evoking a fragile spirituality and Chile bringing water inside the halls to denounce drought, forcing us to face the very element that threatens Venice’s survival. 

Yet, the contrast is brutal, because works born of pain and memory, like Dana Awartani’s precious tiles, are consumed in the time of a compulsive selfie, making us all, simultaneously, critics and accomplices in a choreography that never stops spinning. When the lights go out in November, what will remain? 

The city will stay, with its chronic problems: depopulation, homes emptied to make room for B&Bs, and a cost of living that drives out those who would simply like to live there, turning beauty into a condemnation, the perfect alibi behind which its progressive emptying is hidden. 

The 2026 Biennale, with its title "In Minor Keys," seems an obstinate search for low notes, for whispered sounds amidst a din that threatens to drown out everything; yet, there is an underlying hypocrisy in this whisper, as the Biennale is not an event that truly ends, but an infinite cycle, an eternal return that knows no epiphanies. 

When the curtain falls, city life does not return; only the void of an abandoned set remains, waiting for the next act, in a loop where the city does not live but constantly performs. The season changes, the exhibition changes, but the wear and tear remain constant, and seeking the "minor" in a system built for the "major" is a fragile gesture, destined to be reabsorbed, every year, by the very machine it promised to denounce. 

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