“Sostituzioni”, apparizioni e barene. La Land art alla Biennale di Venezia

How to exhibit Land Art at the Venice Biennale: by reconstructing worlds or renouncing them, depending on how curatorial practices collide with the narratives of art historians versus militant curators. The Gardens of Castello, main site of the Biennale, are not an easy platform for land experiments, but reveal experiences rendered by geological cracks, nebulous atmospheres, green presences, chthonic installations. This intervention recounts Germano Celant’s failures, Renato Barilli’s visionariess, the desire for an impossible task and how the appearance of a Land Art piece can cost 25,000 dollars in 1970. And if unexpected ‘substitutions’ in a landscape can be works of art, Land Art can be made by water, a matter that from the Grand Canal embraces the sandbanks, spaces where anything can happen.