Pope Francis Goes to Prison in Venice
The Holy Father travelled to a women's detention facility to visit the Vatican's Holy See Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Claire Fontaine, Siamo con voi nella notte (We are with you at night). Exhibition view: With my eyes, 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Courtesy Dicastery for Culture and Education.
Pope Francis travelled by Pope-copter to Venice's Giudecca Island to meet with artists and prisoners on Sunday. He is the first pontiff to attend the Venice Biennale.
Speaking in the prison's chapel, he said, 'the world needs artists.'
'Art has the status of a "city of refuge", an entity that disobeys the regime of violence and discrimination in order to create forms of human belonging capable of recognising, including, protecting, and embracing everyone,' he said.
He proposed art practices be a 'network of cities of refuge, cooperating to rid the world of the senseless and by now empty oppositions that seek to gain ground in racism, in xenophobia, in inequality, in ecological imbalance and aporophobia, that terrible neologism that means "fear of the poor".'
Pope Francis visited the detention facility during the exhibition Con i miei occhi (With my eyes), which takes its name from Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 141' ('I do not love thee with mine eyes') and the book of Job, 42:5 ('now mine eye seeth thee').
A huge photo of filthy feet by Maurizio Cattelan appears JR-scale on the exterior of the pavilion, suggesting an outsized need for absolution. Cattelan's inclusion feels like atonement—both for the artist and the church—after his wax sculpture of John Paul II crushed by a meteorite, La Nona Ora (1999), was vandalised in 2001.
(Cattelan recently told The Telegraph that La Nona Ora is 'absolutely not' anti-Catholic, but 'an image of strength. The pope is still holding the cross, and not completely flattened.')
Above the prison's courtyard, an illuminated sign by Claire Fontaine reads 'Siamo con voi nella notte' ('We are with you at night"). These words were first graffitied in front of a jail in Florence in the 1970s when Italians sought to end imprisonments based on no or little evidence.
Other works include Simone Fattal paintings on hardened lava that excerpt prisoners' letters to their loved ones and a 17-minute film shot at the prison by Marco Perego. The film stars Perego's wife, Avatar actress Zoe Saldaña, who plays a prisoner saying her farewells before being released.
In his remarks, Pope Francis name-checked Frida Kahlo, Corita Kent, and Louise Bourgeois in noting the 'unique form' of 'joy and suffering that unite in the feminine'.
Silk-screened prints by Kent, a Catholic nun who died in 1986, feature in the inmates' cafeteria as part of With my eyes. It's another peace-making inclusion after American cardinal James McIntyre described her work as blasphemous in the late 1950s.
'I hope with all my heart that contemporary art can open our eyes, helping us to value adequately the contribution of women as co-protagonists of the human adventure,' the Pope said.
He also cautioned against excessive faith in the market, which risks 'preying on creativity, stealing innocence and, finally, coldly instructing on what is to be done.' —[O]
