Mutating and exploding

We made it to Paris yesterday, after half a week in Rome and another half in Venice. Getting to Paris from Venice required hauling our luggage to the ferry, over several bridges, including the famous and large Rialto Bridge. (Venice is comprised of 118 islands, and there are no cars whatsoever.) Then we took the ferry to the airport, on a leisurely 90 minute ride; then we flew from the beautiful Venice airport to Charles De Gaulle, took a cab ride down to Montmartre, and checked into the lovely flat where we’re staying while teaching for the next two weeks. (One of the many perks of teaching is that our airfare and lodging is part of the deal!)

We’ve been to Paris many times, sometimes for long stretches, so it feels halfway like coming home. I love it here. But I’m still thinking about the loveliness of Venice, a place I genuinely hadn’t thought about much before being there. As I told Tom, I realized I’d unconsciously assumed all of those photos you see, with the gondolas and the beautiful houses and the canals, were in the city’s “old town,” surrounded by newer and less lovely city streets, as is true in plenty of European cities.

But nope! It’s all like that, and more. On Thursday, we took the ferry to the islands of Burano and Murano (great naming there, ancient namers), which are certainly full of tourists but also just incredible. Burano, in particular, has brightly-colored houses lining its streets, each house a different contrasting color from its neighbors:

I think I walked around a bit slack-jawed.

The day after the islands trip, we went to the Venice Biennale, the every-other-year mega-exhibition of (mostly) contemporary art hosted by the city. There are lots of parts; we just went to the main one, at the Armory, and we spent seven hours there.

I can’t say I saw a lot of art I loved, but it was also rather haunting taken as a whole. Most of the work, somewhat arranged according to a dream logic, explored the present and future of humanity, particularly as we slide inexorably toward a post-human world in which technologies drive more and more of not just our lives, but our selves. There were meditations on apocalypses and cyborgs, on the world after us, and a lot of turning back toward the “primitive” (giant air quotes) and the natural to find meaning in the plasticky, too-neat, too-toxic world into which we’ve boxed ourselves.

I think that’s why one piece sticks in my mind, a video installation by Lithuanian artist Eglė Budvytytė called “Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars.” It is an eerie part-dance, part-film, part-music collaboration in which, at times, I wasn’t sure whether I was watching one envisioning of the end or beginning of humankind. In one sequence, several people laying across sand dunes push on all fours up to a bridge, the way one does in the yoga pose, and start walk-sliding down the white sand, like they’ve mutated to move that way. It was incredible, and the musical lyrics included the line “a crack in the narrative / a crack in history” several times, which kind of gave me chills.

I hadn’t realized till just now, reading the artist’s statement for “Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars,” that part of the inspiration is the science fiction of Octavia Butler, who, as Budvytytė puts it, explored “symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity to challenge intolerance and violence of hierarchical thinking.” That’s a main theme in my chapter on Octavia Butler in my upcoming book Salty, in particular the way she layers in food as a display of power and a place where hierarchical thinking is reinforced and challenged. I wrote about her novels, particularly the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, Kindred, and Parable of the Sower — but now, I guess, I know why I kept feeling so connected to this work. I could have stayed in that room at the Biennale all day.

It seems to me that artists of all stripes, in pop culture and otherwise, have been increasingly looking forward this way, some with great pessimism and some with a kind of hope. We had in fact picked to go to Venice, a city literally built on wooden stilts, partly because it is increasingly clear that all 118 islands, which are situated in a lagoon, are going to go underwater, possibly in our lifetimes but almost certainly by 2100. Walking around that very old city that has weathered some real apocalyptic moments — fires, smaller floods, invaders — I thought of how we are all just layers in history’s rock, always convinced we are living through cracks in the narrative, and of course, we really are. Mutating and exploding. Cowering and also marveling at the world we have made for ourselves.

(Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women is out June 28!)