Curator Cecilia Alemani’s Vision for SITE’s 12th International | Pasatiempo

Alemani’s Venice Biennale — or La Biennale di Venezia, 130 years old this season — included 213 artists from 58 countries (180 of those artists had never participated in the Biennale before), more than 1,500 artworks, two special projects, 13 meetings on art, and 30 related events — and more than 800,000 visitors. She was also the first Italian woman to curate the event, in her own country.

The Milan native has a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Milano and a master’s in curatorial studies from Bard College in New York. Growing up in the 1990s, she would geek out, she says, on all kinds of experimental art and spent many nights watching Godfrey Reggio’s films.

It was only by luck that she learned that the experimental filmmaker lives in Santa Fe. When she met him in person, she asked him if she could borrow the title of his latest film, Once Within a Time (2023), for the 12th International. Reggio agreed, and that was that. SITE Santa Fe used stills from the film as background for the theme on its website, and the film will screen at the Lensic on November 18.

Alemani knows what she’s doing, and not just in terms of having a phenomenal grasp on art and organization and vision. Given her ample curatorial experience and international reputation, it’s nothing short of a miracle that she was available to curate SITE Santa Fe’s event. Or is it?

When SITE Executive Director Louis Grachos invited her to visit and asked her to curate SITE’s big event, he knew Alemani would take the show to the next level. Alemani could have said no, as she’s already busy with her day job. But, as she puts it, she couldn’t resist Grachos’ offer.

“He’s one of the most charismatic leaders of institutions right now,” Alemani says, “and I’ve known him for many years. We never worked together, but I’ve always admired him. He’s an intense person but in a very good way. He always supports crazy ideas and never says no.”

She’s also a bit of a lowkey art rock star. Alemani has an easy smile and speaks with a soft Northern Italian accent that you could listen to for hours. On her fingers she wears several rings, two or three of which, from across the table, look like antique gold cameo rings made of shell or of jasperware. Somehow they give Alemani even more of an air of authority on all things art as she speaks of transhistorical exhibitions and why she decided to turn the 12th International into one as well, not unlike what she did in Milk of Dreams.

Alemani wasn’t concerned about addressing certain topics she might have shied away from had she been local. In fact, her outsider identity may have been an advantage: She sees things differently, without any baggage.

She also doesn’t shy away from raising questions or bringing in and giving an international platform to artworks with topics or historical figures that some would consider controversial here in New Mexico. That includes the Santa Fe Internment Camp Marker or La Malinche, an enslaved Nahua (Aztec) woman who was interpreter and adviser to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and whom many in Mexico consider to be a traitor (while others consider her a hero). Art, after all, can help create space for conversations about fraught topics.

Pasatiempo spoke with Alemani about her vision and experience curating SITE Santa Fe’s 12th International. The conversation has been edited for brevity.

There is this idea that Biennales have to be about contemporary art, which is, of course, the case. But I do feel that there’s also something so enriching and nourishing when you look at a contemporary artist next to [work by] someone who might have been interested in similar themes [but a long time ago].

Yes. So, for example, I’m going to look at Maja Ruznic’s paintings next to a whole constellation of works by Rebecca Salsbury James [1891-1968]. And I’m not saying that Maja is inspired by Rebecca Salsbury James, but [what matters is] what happens when you put them together, and you can see that there is something that connects them. Pairings make you look at contemporary artists in a different way. I’ve learned that in Venice.

Also, Santa Fe or New Mexico is kind of the land of Georgia O’Keeffe. But there are and were so many other incredible artists here, like Rebecca Salsbury James, like Agnes Pelton [1881-1961], like other incredible women artists who lived here and lived in her [O’Keeffe’s] shadow but were as talented.

We chose La Malinche because we have an artwork by Autumn Chacon (Diné/Chicana), who’s a local artist from Albuquerque, and her piece is called La Malinche. It’s an Indigenous opera. She created a version of it in New York a couple of years ago, but she’s always dreamed of staging it outside. She has another piece in the show as well, but Autumn’s main thing will be this performance during Indian Market.

The idea that you could go away from SITE and encounter artworks in an abandoned foundry or in a cannabis store, that’s something that doesn’t normally happen in a regular art show. Very often, Biennales take advantage of cities like that, especially if they’re not giant cities, by infiltrating the fabric of the city and creating unexpected encounters between visitors and art.

Even people who already live in Santa Fe might now go to a place where they haven’t been in 20 years, like the foundry or the Palace of the Governors. A lot of people here are telling me, “Oh yes, I remember going when I was a kid.” But then, you know, you’re not a kid anymore, and you haven’t been back in 20 years. It’s also a way to show the city through the eyes of the artists.

We’re grafting on the great cultural ecosystem that exists here, and that’s why we wanted to expand the show, because SITE is not in a vacuum. There are so many incredible institutions we’re partnering with.

At times, I’ve perceived a bit of a separation between people who come to see contemporary artists at venues like SITE and people who’d go to the history museum. Each place has a different community, different audience, different mission. So, the idea [with the 12th International] is that I can go to the Folk Art Museum, but also to the Military Museum, where a lot of people probably have never been to, and I can now link together all these different stories that are already there on their own.

Or if somebody who goes to the history museum finds that [what they see there] is part of a larger exhibition, maybe that’s a motivation for them to come to SITE and see the rest of the exhibition. So, hopefully, it’s a show that can talk to different audiences and a diverse public.

The Japanese internment camp is an important chapter in the story of Santa Fe, but people don’t really know much about it. One of the artists in the show, his name is David Horvitz, has a special relationship with that history because he’s also himself of Japanese origin, and his grandmother was incarcerated in an internment camp like this one but in Colorado.

So we did a lot of research on things that could be interesting for artists or people who were interesting to us for the 12th International, and then we shared it with the artists. We shared history, some figures. And [Horvitz] was like, “Oh, I’ve done works about that before, but I didn’t realize there was an internment camp in Santa Fe.”

His piece is a kind of evocative memorial. It’s comprised of 4,555 glass marbles. That’s exactly the number of prisoners who were incarcerated here, and they were all men. To make the glass marbles, David came here, he went to the site [of the internment camp], and he picked some sand from the arroyo, and he put a little pinch of sand in each of these marbles. He will cover the floor of the Finquita, the foundry, as a sort of memorial.

I’m a foreigner, and what excites me about Santa Fe is how you can really see that these three main cultures — and many more cultures actually — coexist, but in a very lively way. They all collaborate, they clash. Everything is so vibrant here, everyone says, “We’re gonna fight about this or that,” and I love that, because, in a way, you can feel that this here is not history, it’s the present, and it’s completely unresolved, and maybe it doesn’t have to be resolved in one direction or the other. And everybody has an opinion. ◀