As we prepare for the upcoming 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, I find myself still reflecting on my experience of attending the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, and think about whether or not there was a true understanding of community and what it means to invite and welcome others in. I live for a good title for artworks, collections, exhibitions, etc., and considering the state of the world at the time and where it currently stands, Foreigners Everywhere, was spot on, appropriate, and still rings relevant today. There was so much art to experience from the main pavilion to the country-specific pavilions and auxiliary exhibitions throughout Venice. I’m not sure whether the curator of the biennale, Adriano Pedrosa, realized it or not, but with so many of us descending upon the city, that in itself was a type of performance art. Since there were, in fact, Foreigners Everywhere!
But with these “foreigners everywhere”, myself included, as a Black/African-American woman, who is originally from Detroit, MI, and currently living in Albuquerque, NM, I couldn’t help but wonder about community and how we, the collective we, ended up creating various makeshift communities in order to navigate and orient ourselves in this unfamiliar city that many called home for the Biennale. And this became more and more apparent as I visited different pavilions, because there was an underlying theme of community: how does one create community? How do you invite and welcome others into where they are active and contributing members to the community? What does it mean to share my community with another? How has my community been treated by another community? Or how do I entrust my community to another? Will they handle it with care? Will it be idolized or fetishized? Do I know what it means to be in community? Can I share my failures and lessons learned in community building and engagement?
For some pavilions, it ranged from falling flat to being aspirational. To me, it seemed that the artists loved the idea of community but hadn’t truly been in community. Which makes sense, because in today’s world, community is one of the most overused, least understood, idealized, and fantasized by the society majority. Groups of people in one space, physical or in the digital space, does not a community make. Community requires active participation and engagement. Collective and individual responsibility and accountability for ourselves.
Then you had others who were able to successfully share their community with the world, but in a way that respects their culture and heritage. This was done by creating a brief makeshift community, by inviting individuals who are foreigners to the community, where they feel as if they belong to that community in that moment. There was an intentional effort and space made for them to do so. Intentionality is a crucial element when cultivating and sustaining community. An example of this is the U.S. Pavilion, Jeffrey Gibson, the space in which to place me. Gibson was intentional in honoring the culture of Indigenous communities in the United States, while also addressing the notion that many consider these Indigenous communities to be non-existent or exist in the imagination of Western films and television shows, or that they have never been in Venice. Gibson invited Indigenous dancers, artists, poets, and musicians from different tribes to be a part of the space in which to place me. The artist continued expanding this community by inviting and welcoming visitors to the Venice Biennale to participate in dances and encouraged them to take up space in designated areas meant to do so, while also respecting those they are in community with.
The Australian Pavilion also excelled in this area by showing the impacts and what happens when a community is not treated well, honored, or respected. This was done in the pavilion’s artist, Archie Moore’s work, kith and kin, an expansive, illustrative genealogical chart that spans over 65,000 years, referencing his multicultural heritage, that takes audiences through a journey of history, colonization, identity, community, and our understanding of time.
As a way to show solidarity with another community, the Dutch Pavilion presented work from the Congolese collective, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolasie, which focused on the regeneration and cultivation of Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, through works made from sugar, which is of importance considering the first Anglo-Dutch plantation of Unilever was built there.
This demonstrates how one community can acknowledge past harm to another and take action to make a change. In this instance, due to the visibility of this work, the collective was able to take the proceeds from the sales of the works in the exhibition to regain more than 200 hectares of land that was a former plantation. The Dutch Pavilion used this moment as an opportunity to show solidarity with the community of Listanga, stepping aside for them to have a platform to share and address their issues with the global community.
With the title of the 60th Venice Biennale at the top of mind, for me, especially in these times, brought up questions about how can we engage with communities that aren’t our own. What does it mean to be in a global community? What does it mean to be an active and engaged participant in a community? How do we re-learn how to be in a healthy community with ourselves and one another? How can we learn from previous generations and not continue the legacy of harm, displacement, destruction of communal knowledge, and erasure of communities that we are and aren’t a part of? But we all have to start from somewhere, especially when it isn’t innate to us, right?
Jarifuller 
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